


nor are we forgiven (which brings us back)

by TolkienGirl



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Episode IX - but not really, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), In-universe AU, Jealousy, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, TENSION AND FEELINGS IN GENERAL, Takodana, Tropes, Unresolved Sexual Tension, a huge and overly ambituous AU, gratuitous use of poetry, if I told you this was Reylo versus a cruel double version of It's a Wonderful Life, many tropes, very flagrant disregard of lots of Star Wars rules and regulations, would you believe me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-03-08 19:24:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 31,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13464921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Sometimes going back to the beginning is farther back than you expect. [Post-TLJ, Rey and Kylo both believe they had the right idea. The Force decides to give them both their wish.]





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey y'all, I should be writing my other WIPs shouldn't I? YET HERE I AM. *blows a kiss*  
> Let me just say right now, I research certain things and I don't care about others. I'm here for Reylo. That's all. So if I get a SW universe detail wrong...go read another fic? Or just enjoy this one for what it is? Thanks.

_“We have not touched the stars,_  
_nor are we forgiven, which brings us back_  
_to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,_  
_not from the absence of violence, but despite_  
_the abundance of it.”_

_\- Richard Siken_

_“Why should the imagination of a man /_ _Long past his prime remember things that are /_ _Emblematical of love and war? /_ _Think of ancestral night that can,_

_If but imagination scorn the earth /_ _And intellect its wandering /_ _To this and that and t'other thing, /_ _Deliver from the crime of death and birth.”_

_\- William Butler Yeats, A Dialogue of Self and Soul_

 

By the seventh day, Rey has nearly told Leia seven times.

Always at night. Scant as their numbers are, Leia now makes the rounds just before most of them head to their bunks, pressing a hand on a bent shoulder here, quirking one of her wry, weary grins there.

And when she comes to Rey, night after night after— _soon it will be eight, and then a dozen, and Rey will tell her_ —it is not Leia’s eyes that haunt her.

His eyes are dark like that. His eyes fight fire with shadow, reminding her of sacrifice. And always, Rey thinks of him in present tense.

She only has to keep reminding herself that she should no longer think of him as Ben.

There are wounds to be bound. Poe—he is shorter than Rey had imagined, but that is not his fault—has a dislocated shoulder. Or had. Chewie pops it back in for him, with an accompanying howl that drowns out any sound Poe makes.

(She knows that the blaster shot, that night on the bridge, nearly killed him. Chewie pulled aside at the last moment. That’s the only reason Kylo Ren didn’t fall as his father fell. Because of mercy, or something like that.)

Leia is going to begin to be suspicious. Leia has known too much grief to let it consume her for long.

“I’m fine,” Rey practices saying, to herself. She misses her ragdoll in the AT-AT. Wonders how much remains of her little haunt in Jakku. Wonders if the sands have covered it by now. Kinder, in their oblivion, than she is to herself.

(Rey picks at scabs.)

“Who are you talking to?” Finn is not unscathed either. Bruises are blossoming, deep purple against his dark skin. The Rey of another time would have lifted a hand, would have brushed her fingers lightly against his cheek.

But her hands cannot be trusted and she keeps them at her sides. “Just going over some coordinates.”

There’s no nav system in front of her. Not even an old manual. But maybe Finn is too tired to call her out on the lie. “Everyone’s bunking down soon,” he says. “I’m going to sit up with Rose for a while, but I wanted to make sure…” he breaks off, biting his lip.

Rose has not yet woken up. How much of what Finn feels is duty, and how much is something more, Rey doesn’t know. She doesn’t ask.

She lost the right to, sometime after Ahch-To.

Finn is her family. She knows that with the fierce knowledge of wrapping one’s arms around something. Finn and Leia and even Poe—they are her people.

_You’re not alone._

_Neither are you._

The sob rises in her throat and she blinks as though that will send it away, wrestle it to the depths of her sternum.

Distance is not safety, but it is close enough.

It has to be.

“I’m alright,” she manages. “I think I’ll finally sleep tonight.”

Finn nods. His smile reaches his eyes but there isn’t any humor in it, just comfort. Rey wishes it could reach her. “You need it.”

Yes, Rey needs.

It is the seventh day since Crait. Crait is no longer even in a dust mote in the vision-lines of their plotted course; it is nothing more than red crystals wedged into the soles of her boots and the memory of eyes like Leia’s eyes.

To say it is nothing, then, is not much help at all.

…

Maybe they should send her to Tython.

She can’t make out too much from the texts—her reading is shaky at best, and the Jedi texts are not exactly the occasional scrap of pulp paper, bleached by sun, that would make its way to Jakku with rumors of green places, golden cities, and more people than Jakku had burned to dust in all its history.

The texts are dense.

But Rey makes out _flesh-eaters_ and _temple location_ —a question, not an answer—and Tython looks rather soft in the sketches drawn. She could handle the flesh-eaters. She will not be afraid.

And yet _afraid_ seems to be the only explanation, when it comes working up the courage to tell Leia her idea. She thinks it is nearly impossible when day eight rises (sunless, there are no suns in space, only stars) and she still has not given away the larger secret that must frame every other question like a horizon.

_Send me to Tython, send me to somewhere no one can find me. Send me away, so that no one can find you._

So drastic a plea would require some kind of explanation. And there is the root of Rey’s problem. She can run from him, or from the Resistance, but if she runs from everything at once she will collide with herself.

(Once more, once more, the room of mirrors.)

(They shift not as one but as a fracture spirals outward, and Rey realizes that foresight is knowledge without patience, and perhaps that makes her afraid.)

…

Poe wants them to go to the Outer Rim. Rey is crumbling her nutrition bar into her hand to slow the time it will take her to eat it. No one is grimacing over their rations, although they taste like cardboard. No one in the Resistance expects better. Rey might miss her bread, but someday, probably, she will miss this. At least it is filling her belly.

_Durasteel, all around—_

_Knees and chest drawn forward, feet scrabbling for a hold—_

_You can’t breathe. Leather presses against the hollows of your throat; you skid to a halt._

_You can’t breathe._

_Teeth—crushing, warm, angry—against your lips_.

Rey sends half of her nutrition bar flying across the floor.

Every head turns towards her. Poe, mouth forming on the word _Hoth_ , stares open-mouthed.

“I’m so sorry,” Rey says. “I—reflex. It was my arm.”

Leia’s eyes narrow at her, and Rey knows: the eighth day will be the last to keep her silence.

…

“You were not with Luke.”

“I went to Ahch-To,” Rey protests, as though half a lie can save her. “I—”

“Rey,” Leia says. “I learned long ago that secrets suit the dead better than the living. Cough it up.”

Rey stares at her hands. His fingertips had been softer than hers, less calloused. Perhaps it was the gloves. “I went to save him,” she says. And since Leia has lost nearly everyone she loved to the saving of that particular _him_ , she does not ask for a name.

“How?”

“We’ve been connected by…visions.” Something in Rey snaps like a string pulled tight. _Anger_ , again, and not hers, though it could be. She wonders if he can see her, or if this is her own guilt. She doesn’t think that the bond is open (she doesn’t know if it can be shut).

Leia presses her lips tight, but her eyes hold—can it be relief?

The words tumble out of Rey just as she feared they would. “I c-can’t control it. Maybe neither of us can. But we started meeting and—I did tell him he was a—” She stops. To admit her weakness would be to dishonor Han Solo’s death. To call Kylo Ren a monster is to say it to his mother’s face.

“Luke and I shared a kind of connection,” Leia says. If the past tense hurts her any more than usual, she does not show it. “And Han wasn’t force-sensitive—wasn’t any kind of sensitive, the scoundrel—but I could feel him, too.”

Rey is pressing nails to palm, as memory or future pressed his teeth to her lip less than an hour earlier. “What does it mean?”

Leia looks at her like she should know.

“I don’t want this.” Rey is desperate. “I didn’t ask for—”

Leia’s brow quirks up. “When has asking ever brought anything to anyone?”

_A hand, outstretched._

_Please._

“I don’t think it’s safe for me to be here,” Rey says. “The visions have—well, I haven’t had any, but he’s angry.”

For a moment, her greatest fear is that Leia will ask her why. But perhaps, again, Leia already knows.

“If he finds me again, I’ll betray you all without meaning too,” Rey whispers. “I should have told you sooner, but I—”

She couldn’t bear to be alone. And now Leia will be angry that Rey has balanced the survival of so few—too few—on the edge of her own need.

“There are other ways to fight than running,” Leia says. “Although, it sure looks like we’re running now, doesn’t it?”

Rey nods. There are tears in her eyes. There is a sob, and there is salt on her tongue. It is not Crait’s salt. “I don’t know what to do.”

…

In the end, she sleeps.        

…

Rey wakes to forget her dreams. They are all of him, and in some of them she stays. In some of them, he can only say her name, and in some of them, neither of them say anything at all.

“Takodana is near Endor. Relatively.”

Rey rolls out of her bunk, and forces herself from staving off her own instinct for a fighting stance. It is only Leia.

“I know,” Rey says. Takodana is many things to her and all of them are broken.

“We are going to Endor,” Leia explains. “Chewie and I, at least, will be remembered there. It is small enough and secret enough to be out of the way. And more than that…we took him there when he was a boy. I think he will tell himself that he does not want to go back.”

Leia is speaking more openly, Rey knows, because Rey is the only one here who understands. She nods.

“Luke ran from the past. I left mine behind me.” Leia sighs, once, deep. “I’m starting to wonder if you aren’t at the heart of all of this, Rey.”

Rey does not want to think about hearts. “What do you mean?”

“I feel him too. Anger, darkness—yes, that’s all there. Now there’s something else.”

If Rey allows herself to remember, it is more than the touching of hands. It is her name on his lips and his name on hers, it is the way they turned as one together, facing death, it is—

Rey will not allow herself to remember.

“Loss,” Leia finishes quietly. “He feels loss. And that is perhaps the closest my son has been to hope in a long time.” She lets her proud shoulders slump a little. “We’re so few, Rey. Running won’t last forever.”

“So you want me to go Takodana,” Rey says. Why, oh why, must her voice shake? _Foolish girl. This was your idea, wasn’t it?_ “To end things?”

“No.” Leia stares at her like she’s daft. “I want you go back to the beginning.”

…

“I don’t get it.”

Rey can’t help feeling as though she’s poked through her ribcage and pried out her own heart. “Finn, it’s…” She doesn’t want to say that it’s their only hope, because it probably isn’t, and she said that last time. “It’s something I have to do. To mend.”

She won’t explain—not here, not now—what she hopes will happen. That the bond will be severed or resolved. That she’ll be able to sort out what passed between them. And all of that—what she can foresee, or even try to—doesn’t come close to what Leia wants out of it.

Once again, Rey dares not ask what Leia has guessed.

_You’re nothing. No one. But not to me._

“I’ll come back,” Rey murmurs.

“I’m coming with you,” Finn blusters, but Poe has a hand on his arm.

“We need you here.”

Finn’s eyes settle on Rey, waiting for her to tell him that she needs him too. And she does, but that’s exactly why she can’t tear him away from their people.

She stays silent. That turns the tide towards _goodbye_.

…

The last night before Takodana, it is as if she has already left. Finn has taken up watch again by Rose’s makeshift medbay bunk. Poe and Kaydel are hunched over an X-wing manual, talking about repairs. No one asks about Rey’s solitary mission, because it was Leia’s direct order.

 _Rey will take one of the pods to Takodana, and rejoin us later on Endor_ , Leia had said, and her tone had not sought questions.

Rey lies on her back, fingers circling against her palm. She doesn’t want her doll from Jakku anymore; she wants the lightsaber. But it is packed away with her supplies and her staff.

_Two pieces, you and him. Two pieces._

It would be easier if she could find her old anger and hatred towards him. Easier if she could believe that his offer in red and blood and dying sparks was all a lie.

_Don’t do this, Ben._

Rey does not know what she will find on Takodana.

Nor does she know what will find her.

…

Its very greenness pains her now. One foot in front of the other, and she points her mind forward as well as her steps. To look back is to think of how Finn pulled her close, without even looking her in the eyes. How Poe and the rest saluted her, as though she was doing them any good.

How Leia—

Leia said nothing at all, only held Rey tight for a moment, and then let her go.

The ground beneath her feet is moss to the ankle. The lightsaber is wound in the folds of her sash; her staff is in her hands. If she breathes too deeply, the spice of the evergreens will bring back the sound of Han’s voice and the spires of Maz’s city.

Rey shuts her eyes.

_Grief, a hollow center, an answering ache._

_Battered fists, a throat hoarse with weeping._

She reels back. It is so much different than his anger.

She just doesn’t know which one is real.

…

The air is cool, but not too heavy. The trees chatter with birds but she sees no other signs of life. And when she comes upon that bay of water and sees the city, laid flat as a coffin, tears prick her eyes.

 _We brought destruction here_ , she remembers.

She wonders if destruction is a path of its own, or if it is following her.

Leia didn’t exactly give her a mission. Leia told her to go back to the beginning, and the beginning, for Rey, is underneath rubble. She found the lightsaber there. She found—

Her vision was cold as pain and bright as fear, and she saw him before she knew him.

 _Well,_ she thinks. _This is the beginning._

…

Rey lets the Force guide her. The air is snapping with it here. The Force has a mind of its own, and Rey used to think she had a mind of _her_ own, but it grows harder and harder to tell. She keeps to a narrow passageway in her mind, which does _not_ look anything like the long line of mirrors, and she leads with hands out in front of her.

She sets her staff aside and heaves away stones. Yes, here at last, beneath the ruins of the common room, are the shoulders of steps.

_These are your first steps._

Rey does not know that voice.

 _So you’re the girl I’ve heard so much about_.

As for _that_ voice—

If she wandered far enough into the forest, she would find trees scarred by blade and blaster bolts. She would not find their footsteps, burned into the earth, but she can retrace them with her mind.

She has tied an old sash over her mouth, to keep from coughing up dust. The prickle down her spine, however, is not dust or any underground draft.

At the end of the steps her path is blocked by two great wedges of rock.

She opens the passageway first in her mind. She stretches out one hand, then the other, and then she jolts back.

For a moment, she could have sworn, warm fingers laced through hers.

She nearly shouts out, _Get out of my head_ —another memory uncomfortably close to Takodana—but doing so would let him _into_ her head.

Rey grits her teeth.

Forever is forever, at least when it has to be.

( _When has asking ever brought anything to anyone?_ ).

 _Let me go_ , she breathes. _Let me go._

The earth doesn’t move under her feet.

(Everything else does.)

…

Overhead, the sky is the color of rock-salt: white, tinged with gray shadow. Rey hears her own breathing first, and then she hears everything else: the blur and chaos of a thousand voices.

Her ears are ringing and every bone aches. Her mouth tastes like something died there.

Maybe something did. Maybe she is dead.

She stumbles to her feet, and if this is death, death is a city.

No one seems terribly concerned with being dead, though. There is a gaggle of metal traders practically trampling over her, and a faction of dark-robed, impossibly thin creatures shuffle past, low voices hissing to one another. Her eyes skim over dirty human children, tumbling in the street, and some humped pack animal plods by, braying pitifully beneath its load.

Under her prodding fingertips, Rey’s arms and shoulders feel utterly familiar. Sore, still, yet familiar.

 _I am not dead_.

But that is no answer to any other question.

…

She keeps her head down.  Yes, if there is one thing that becoming so, so much more than Rey of Jakku has taught her, it is that danger lurks around every corner. And although there is much life here, Rey recognizes hungry faces and dark, frightened eyes at each turn. She is no longer on Takodona, and despite the crowds, she feels like she might as well be at the end of the world.

The streets weave together here like a basket pulled loose in parts. Some are nearly parallel, separated only by a few traders’ stalls. Others are stretched apart by long, low buildings. Lodgings, Rey thinks. She squints, trying to get a look beyond the next alley.

The shrill keening of an alarm blares. Rey feels the panic rise around her as the sandstorms used to rise in Jakku, a groundswell spinning up. An Arcona, wide-set-eyes flailing, jostles her forward. She darts out of one alley and finds herself on the main street at last. It is a wide swath cut down the center of this strange city. Rey tries to retreat to the relative obscurity of the alley, but finds her way blocked by a flesh-and-blood wall.

She realizes, belatedly, that everyone else is on their knees.

…

Rey has never been very good at self-preservation.  That’s probably why she tends to go for battle.

At the moment, therefore, she does not press her forehead to the ground with the rest of them. She kneels, and hates to do so, but she lifts her head to watch what it is that sweeps down upon this city, which is not quite alive.

Storm troopers.

Rey swears mentally, so strongly that she wonders why she hasn’t felt a surge through whatever tattered remains of the bond there are. But there’s—nothing. Silence, and stillness, where she’s been fighting a steady push for days.

Storm troopers, and a figure in black—

Panic surges through Rey. It _must_ be panic, to send such a tingle to her fingertips. It must be panic, for she does not dare feel anything else.

Logic follows a moment after. The figure in black is a foot shorter than Kylo Ren, and smaller in every dimension. Shoulders, waist— _recognition_ —Rey tries to catch a glimpse of a face, but a white-plated shoulder blocks her view.

The alarm sounds again. The troopers halt. Rey blinks and breathes with a white boot six inches in front of her nose.

 _Look down_ now _, you kriffing idiot_.

A clank, a puff of dust. The ranks have shifted back a step.

Rey stops breathing.

Footsteps don’t burn into the earth; she knows this. She knew this in Takodana, but that might have been a year ago or half-an-hour ago. The shadow that falls over her is darker than the ones that trace the pale sky.

She sees the black folds of a heavy robe.

Every fiber of her being is telling her to run, but now it is too late. A hand—leather gloved—reaches down and twists her head back by the hair, tugging hard.

And a voice, almost as cold as it is familiar, rings out. “Who are you?”

Rey lifts her chin a little further.

Her own eyes in her own face stare back.


	2. Chapter 2

_“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river_  
              _but then he’s still left_  
_with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away_  
_but then he’s still left with his hands.”_

_\- Richard Siken_

He spends more time with the tips of his boots nearly flush against glass, watching the galaxy, than he does on the throne.

(It was _Snoke’s_ throne.)

(It was _their_ victory, two together, but only for a moment.)

He has felt remorse, that dull-bladed creature that should only carve the flesh of weaker things. He has felt shame and loneliness, and he has felt the answer splayed over her tear-stained face like the brand on his soul that it is.

But he feels no regret for splitting Snoke quite in half.

Hux will come to discover it eventually, if he has not already. Hux will try to kill him, and maybe he will succeed. Only, Hux has hatred, and _he_ has anger:

Anger burns brighter, even though it never lights its own spark.

The bond is not his to open again. (He has tried.) Instead of a river or a road, there is a well of darkness and sparks of light that do not stay. The Force shimmers and begs at the corners of his mind, every day after Crait.

Skywalker is toying with it, perhaps, from the beyond.

(For his uncle has passed from this world, or from any planet in the galaxy. He felt it.)

(He imagines that she felt it too.)

…

_Don’t do this, Ben._

Sometimes he sends _rage_ out into whatever threads still hang between them. Rage, and her kneeling before him—bitterness, and her lips slashed across his.

But all of this, all of these frantic messages littered into an abyss (falling, as one falls from bridges or from hope) are nothing.

Rey rules him, not the other way around.

He is the Supreme Leader. He bites his own lips until the blood comes.

He stands by the bay windows, and he leans against the cold edges of the throne.

(And it is nothing.)

…

On the ninth day after Crait, his hand curls around his saber, but it rests, unlit against his palm. He cannot bring himself to break with it, not since every part of this black and red and steel is now his. He is the leader Snoke once promised he would be.

Yet he knows that Snoke would not have promised this.

He sees that now. Perhaps he had always been able to see it, but had simply shut his eyes.

He presses against the edges of his dreams at night—when he _does_ sleep. He hopes she feels pain. He hopes she feels anything.

She left him.

It is no comfort, no comfort at all, that she did it because she had to.

_Traitor._

The word could mean anyone.

…

It is the eleventh day, then the twelfth—and will he always count time and space around her?—and Hux has not tried to kill him yet. He leaves the inventory and rebuilding to Hux and his lackeys, and tries to seem tall enough, tries to seem like the whole place is not beating him like a drum.

Hux’s eyes glint redly, as they always have, but for now he seems content to grovel before yet another Supreme Leader.

Hux knows how to wait.

Kylo—for now and for always, so he must call himself—does not.

He feels warmth and wetness on his face; he presses his fingertips against his cheek, but they come away dry.

Somewhere, Rey is crying.

He forgets all his duties and his ownership and returns in short order to that howl of a soul who dueled against an impassive Luke Skywalker, twelve days ago.

The wreckage of electronic panels whine and sputter beneath the darkening gleam in Hux’s eyes.

…

Maybe Hux thinks he won’t have to kill him.

…

When he was young, Snoke’s voice began much like a heartbeat pulsing in his ears. It dragged frustration a little closer to fury, sorrow closer to resentment.

They spent a good deal of time at the heart of the New Republic, yet they traveled. He knew Coruscant, Naboo, even Jakku.

Nowhere ever felt quite like home.

His father left when he was eleven, for a month, after a particularly heated spat with Leia.

The pulse found words, then.

Poisoned words, but some poison is sweet on the tongue.

…

Sleep is almost a mockery. He locks the door to his cabin—he has not moved his chambers, because familiarity is something to cling to. Moreover, he can shut his eyes and imagine the air is shifting again, that Rey, against _her_ will but not the will of something greater, has come to him again.

Sleep betrays him, and he does not find her.

He wakes early, but no blaster is held to his temple.

Not yet.

…

“Supreme Leader.”

The officer blinks nervously, face cast in red, and it takes everything Kylo has to _lounge_ , to fill the battered throne as though it is his reward and not his retribution.

“Report.” The man before him is a tracker. Before he even speaks, Kylo knows what he is going to say—the words are rattling around the man’s mind like a shower of pebbles. Thoughts are like that, mostly.

Hers were not.

“We have a rough location of the Resistance’s ship. They’re headed for the Outer Rim.”

_Fingertips, splayed across shoulder blades._

_The whisper of breath at the hollow of your throat._

Rey is in someone’s arms.

He forces down the shudder that passes through him like a blade ( _I’m being torn apart_ ) and stares down the officer. He doesn’t miss the mask.

He does miss its secrecy.

“I had already predicted as much, Lieutenant.” Clipped tones must suffice. “Have you nothing to add?”

“We know that they had allies on Takodana. They may be trying to rebuild—”

“Dismissed,” Kylo growls. Otherwise he will pluck the man apart vocal cord by vocal cord, and even he can admit that there would be no real reason for it.

…

 _Takodana_.

There are too many things that start there, and all of them are broken.

He tortures himself as Snoke taught him to—shame stretched canvas-wide, failure marked in blood.

He held her in his arms there without realizing what a precious thing it was—before his father, before his failure.

They have touched, since, but not like that.

 _Takodana_. No doubt the officer knew not of what he spoke.

Except Kylo’s dreams that night are flavored only with determination and Rey.

…

It should feel like a death sentence, and maybe it is, but he has written himself so many before.

Hux smiles thinly when informed.

“Whatever you deem wise, Supreme Leader.”

The layers of contempt are palpable. Kylo knows it is not unmerited.

He went down to fight Luke alone, without any other reason but his rage. Now he takes a solitary ship to Takodana, and there is every reason to believe that the fleet will no longer be his own when he returns.

(And yet he goes. Snoke’s ghost would have no satisfactory explanation for that, for it is not _quite_ weakness alone.)

“In my absence, send a detachment to Canto Bight. They suffered capital losses. If we need to shift weapon financing elsewhere, now would be the time to it.” Kylo smiles, all disdain. At least the mask no longer hides that. “Get your droids in a row, General Hux.”

Hux’s grin adds a few more teeth.

Yes, he is the maker of his own exile—but somehow all he feels is relief.

…

Takodana has too much of his father.

Green and wild things, and yes, a calloused hand once held his smaller one.

_“Don’t be afraid, Ben. Maz is an odd bird but she won’t kill you.”_

_“A bird?”_

A crinkle of laughter around the eyes. _“It’s an expression, kid. Just breathe_.”

The scar on his face is burning now. Rey put it there, but his father did first, gently, with the stroke of his thumb. Always the last word, had Han Solo, even when he didn’t speak it aloud.

There is no one here to watch him. He feels salt and wetness rising in his eyes, and this time, they are not Rey’s tears.

…

Three hacked trees later, he comes upon the bay, too placid for a gem, and the city he laid waste to. As a boy, he had loved the curious spires.

As a man, he did not watch as they fell.

The Force is humming, but he can’t feel Rey here. He can’t feel her at all. He sends a particularly vivid image of his mouth snatching greedily at hers through the Bond, just to see if she pushes it away.

Nothing. A flatline.

Panic should not set in under a blue sky, above smooth-shining waters, but it does.

_Takodana, Ben?_

He reels back, as if struck by a blow.

That is his mother’s voice.

They are all gone but her. His uncle, his father, so many allies and old friends. But Leia Organa was a part of himself that he never let Snoke touch. He offered up Han Solo instead, a sacrifice to fury and Snoke’s dragging, clawing hands.

He thinks his father would understand. Or would have understood, if Ben had not killed him.

_Come home._

(Maybe his father still does.)

He remains silent, pretending that that silence is not sullen.

 _My foolish son._ There’s an edge there—he’d be afraid to face her—but love, too. He holds himself away from it as best he can. _It’s just you and me now. Why Takodana. Could you feel her too?_

He presses his lips tightly together, but if he even closes her off, she’ll know he heard.

_You love her, don’t you._

_Ben._

He cries out, strikes ground and water with his blade. Lets a hissing rivulet travel across that glass surface, as if breaking what has already been broken and healed will bring any kind of justice to him.

His mother doesn’t say any more.

…

The bond is slack and silent. The Force is swirling, but it carries with it no answers. It occurs to him once, terribly, that Rey may be dead.

But no—by the Maker (and how long has it been since he invoked such a name?), he would feel that. He _would_.

_Fate would likely have you kill her yourself._

The voice doesn’t sound like anyone’s. He shakes it away, swearing in as much blood as he can draw from the insides of his mouth that it will not be his hands that tear the life and light out of her. Not this time.

_Then who ordered the ship brought down? And who sends war-dogs after the scraps of her people?_

“They are not her people,” he spits, aloud. “No matter how deceived she may be, _I_ am not.”

It sounds foolish, when words such as those fall on the softness of the air.

…

Every fallen city looks the same. Great slabs that once were walls; a curiously unbroken windowpane here or there.

He did this.

Or at least, he ordered it.

Rey would say it was all the same.

Rey set her fingers on his and told him he was not alone, but only when he told her first.

The tightening between his ribs knows no color, no explanation. None, at least, that he is willing to give.

He takes a step, then another. Lets the Force guide him, as if it is ever in a truly giving mood. He imagines his uncle and his father watching him, stone-faced. Maybe Snoke, even now, still has a few strings tied between his bones.

Something is pulling him.

_One step, then another._

Rey was here. _Was_.

Once more, the fear rises—already gone, already dead, and he did not feel it because he has no heart after all.

He runs.

Steps, there were steps here, once. They descend in thick dust and the beginnings of forgiving moss.

Slabs of stone block his path.

He pauses, and raises a hand. They should move without much effort. He has lifted heavier things. He lifts his head up every single day.

…

The stones do not move.

…

_Now, Ben. It isn’t about wanting, it’s about letting go. Can you do that? Can you let go?_

The boy called Ben never could.

…

The first time he hears of Rey—and this he does not tell her, this he tells no one, and hides away the memory like a pearl from a far star, safe as he can make it from Snoke—

The first time he hears of her is not the first time he has dreamt of her.

In his dreams, the girl has no face. But he knows her voice, and he knows her _need_.

She is his, until he finds her, and she fights.

…

The stones do not move. He rocks back on his heels, grits his teeth, swears a little. All his curses are Corellian.

The stones do not move. They almost look bigger.

They _are_ bigger.

Or else he has grown smaller, feet sinking in the dust and rubble. Ankle, knee, hip. The stones have blotted out the light.

He opens his mouth, and afterward, he will wonder who he even thought would hear him call.

…

Water. He is drowning.

Or not. Kylo sits up and it only reaches to his sodden elbows. The splashing on the back of his neck is quite a different matter.

He is sitting in a fountain.

The galaxy, as ever, seems to have a cruel sense of humor. He tracks through memory—slabs of stone, sinking, falling, calling Rey’s name—

There is no explanation for his sudden reappearance as something dangerously close to bedraggled rat.

Little though he cares for being Supreme Leader, most of the time (and _that_ , too, is not how it was supposed to be), he knows that it does not befit a Supreme Leader to be watered in a stranger’s fountain.

Kylo gets up.

The whole place is gray and obsidian. Yet, on reconsideration, obsidian is too shining for such a dull-walled place as this.

The courtyard’s flagstones are as gray as the sky above. There are houses stacked like boxes placed precisely atop each other, in graduating size.

Kylo strains his eyes. Above these rooftops are the towers of a citadel. Below lie gray and dusty streets.

The prickle down his spine says he’s been here before.

…

It comes to him in pieces at first, and then in one final blow of realization.

He is in the Hosnian System. He is standing in what was once a senator’s garden above the chaotic streets of Hosnian Prime. Often enough he came here as a child, wandering between the dark-walled senators’ houses, yearning to sneak further out into the city, to the marketplace below.

He remembers the Starkiller, light and darkness, remembers that Snoke had laughed inside his mind when the light faded.

Hosnian Prime no longer exists.

That is how he knows that something is very, very wrong.


	3. Chapter 3

_I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;_  
_I lift my lids and all is born again._  
_(I think I made you up inside my head.)_

_\- Sylvia Plath_

It is only lately that Rey has grown accustomed to mirrors.

This is no mirror.

Rey-not-Rey looms above her, taller than she has a right to be. From chin the hairline, her face is powdered white. A finger-width of black smears down her lips. The lines of kohl that skid along her eyelids are sharp-pointed as daggers.

Her eyes are the color and shape of Rey’s own. This is no surprise, though everything else is. Somehow, this is what shocks her: that her own eyes can look so cruel.

 _You didn’t even try to fight it_ , Luke’s voice echoes, as far back as Ahch-To, and almost farther. _You didn’t even try._

Rey-not-Rey is speaking again, and Rey-not-Rey shows no flicker of fear.

Rey feels enough fear for the both of them. (The both of her? Can such a thing _be_?)

“Do you think that by some kind of trick you can deceive me? For one who does not _want_ anything from me, every step you take reeks of desperation.” Her voice is like frost, and better-trained—better accented—than Rey’s is.

But more than that, it seems as if she’s speaking to someone who isn’t even there.

Rey finds her own voice. Less wisely, perhaps, she also finds her hands, and reaches up to free her hair from the other’s taut and steely grasp.

“This is a dream isn’t it?” she demands, and she scrambles to her feet because a fight is certainly brewing. Every storm trooper does a half-turn, weapons at elbow height.

 And maybe this would be the moment Rey dies, or the moment when she wakes up. Leia was only sending her to Takodana, not here.

 _This isn’t real_ , she thinks.

Then an explosion shakes the earth like wrung-out cloth.

The dust rises in a fog, but Rey in all worlds is still Rey of Jakku. It is muscle memory that binds her spare sash around her face, and it is a scavenger’s eye for when to cut and run that rolls her into a low tumble to the side, into the floundering, coughing crowd. They are milling and screaming and trampling, clawing at their eyes.

Rey’s hand all but cracks under the harsh press of a boot, and she stifles her cry, forcing herself to find her feet. People in panic are nothing like a sandstorm, but she fights her way through all the same.

Crowds, unlike sandstorms, can be outrun.

Through the weave of the sash, her eyes sting too. Maybe it was more than dust. Some kind of gas? If this is a dream, why does it hurt so much?

Keeping her shoulders hunched forward, she darts into what she prays is an alley, not a dead-end or a trap. She flattens her back against a wall of stone.

She is not waking up. She is not waking up.

A hand claps on her shoulder. Rey knows the size and shape and weight of that hand. “Sorry about all the sneezing,” says a voice, that is one part familiar and one part all wrong. “It’ll pass.”

And Rey is a fighter. She doesn’t have to see to grasp a wrist in her good hand, to hook her ankle behind a knee, and fell to the ground whoever has touched her.

She tears off the sash, barely caring for how her eyes sting sharply.

His face may be concealed behind a mask, and her gaze may be blurred with tears, but too much has happened for her _not_ to know him. It’s him.

Rey would swear her life on it.

(Perhaps she will have to.)

Kylo lies stone-still, but only for a second. The next second, he’s on his feet again. Not unexpectedly, he crushes her against the wall, her hands gathered too tight in his. Her left hand is bruised already; it smarts. “What are you doing here?” The gas mask he’s wearing doesn’t distort his voice like the helmet did. She doesn’t know what to make of that.

“What am _I_ doing here?” Rey is practically stiff with fury, and with much more difficulty than she dragged her hair from Rey-not-Rey’s grip a few moments ago, she twists her way out of his hold. And then it hits her. The fever-dream, the explosion. The gas mask.

 “Is this you?” Rey grits out. Her voice will be shrill in a moment, and she doesn’t have much left, but she will not look weak. Not any weaker than she looks now, eyes weeping as the fog clears, breath sawing hoarsely in her lungs. “Is this all some trick of yours, to make a mockery of what I wanted for you?” _For us_ , she does not quite say—but only by a breath.

Only by a breath.

This time he does what she does _not_ expect. His hands, trembling—and bare: he is not wearing his gloves and in fact he wears no black at all, which is _not at all like him_ —lift the mask from his face.

Rey muffles a cough in her sleeve and tries to pretend that her heart has not skipped giddily.

There is no scar on Kylo Ren’s face.

He stares at her blankly, lips parted. His lips are…well, the same lips. It’s not like Rey hasn’t thought about them. “What are you talking about?”

_No scar. Even though it was you who split him wide open, you who carry that memory wherever you—_

She does not know where she is. Or _who_ she is, which seems more to the point at the moment.  “Who is she?”

“She?” His eyes are watering too, and he muffles a cough against the crook of his arm.

“The one,” Rey spits, “Who _has my face_.”

Kylo—if it really is him—flicks both eyebrows upwards. “So you’re really not her.”

“No, I’m not _her_. And is that what you think of me? That I would lead stormtroopers, and let the people _kneel_ before me, like frightened rats? Is that what you’re trying to show me? A fine way to tempt to your side!”

“I…I don’t know…” He covers up his confusion much more quickly than she is used to see him do. And all of this stitches together, like laughter and starlight and darkness—

—if there is another Rey, could there be another Ben?

_Is this all some trick of yours…_

She watches him warily, searching for reminders of the man who bears his face. Maybe the change is reflected in the scars that divide them. He sounds exasperated when he speaks, but not laden with rage and raw nerve endings. “I’m not trying to show you anything. I could ask you the same question, sweetheart. What next? You’re going to say this is some double deception? Should I be looking out for some strange reflection of myself?”

“I hope to Hoth _not_ ,” Rey returns, perhaps too forcefully. Or perhaps not forcefully enough. “And don’t call me _sweetheart_.”

His lips twist in a grin that is too much like his father’s. And that’s how Rey knows that the man before her is not the man she left behind.

“Sorry, _milady_. It’s a family thing.”

_A family thing._

…

There are no storybooks on Jakku. No holovids. Barely any legends, and certainly not for a girl with a songbird’s frail bones but a hawk’s determination.

So it is that fate means very little on Jakku. Destiny, even less. The things Rey kept—the stories she gathered—were brightly colored adventures. The Jedi and their saber-blades. Smuggling pilots. Night fights in the blue-black sky, explosions that showered sparks like rain, only in every direction instead of just down.

If this is a dream, it is not one she would have authored.

If this is greater than a dream, it is hard to tell if the charcoal-dusted earth is any more dependable than the sky.

Luke warned her not to enter the deep. But Rey has never been very good at following, only at waiting, and forging ahead after that.

In the cave that beckoned, she found a thousand reflections of her own self.

Legends have to begin somewhere.

…

“Who are you?”

“I should be asking you the same question.”

“I’m not looking to be anyone’s enemy,” Rey says. “I don’t know who—who _she_ was, or why there’s someone who looks just like me—”

That ever-present grin is cast, suddenly, with bitterness. “Supreme Leader Rey would insist that you look like her, not the other round.”

The chill that passes over her is not confined to prickles on her skin. It goes deeper that that. Rey feels it in her bones. “I came from Takodana.” She will _not_ sound desperate, not to any incarnation of _him_. “Do you know it?”

“Well enough. We’re far from there, at the moment—the Hosnian System.”

Starkiller Base. The first successful test. Rey hacks in a breath, dread snatched inward. “That doesn’t exist anymore.” Oh, _kriff_. She shouldn’t go around saying things like that! She nips her own tongue to punish herself.

Ben Solo’s eyebrows rocket towards his hairline. “Tell that to the Hosnian System, sweetheart.”

Rey grimaces at the reappearance of  _sweetheart_ , but figures it’s time to throw the last roll of dice. “Your mother sent me.”

…

She says it stubbornly, nails to palm, as if boldness will save her. They don’t have much time to argue when one thinks about it, with stormtroopers and a Supreme Leader wearing her face, but that hasn’t stopped either of them yet.

For the first time his eyes look like Kylo’s eyes. The expression—if it even is one—disappears almost at once. “That’s it. You’re coming with me.”

She doesn’t like the way he says it. Assurance, and decision, neither of which he seems to allow to belong to her.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” she snaps. “I need to come with you.”

He stops, and with a quick spin, he’s hovering over her. His shoulders are as broad as she remembers. He jabs a finger at her. “No Force tricks.”

Rey hangs back. The fog in the streets has all but settled; she breathes easier again, though her heart is keeping up a rapid pace. “What is the Force?”

He barks a laugh. If it sounds like Kylo’s, she would not know—she has never heard _him_ laugh. “You’re as bad a liar as she is.”

Then Ben Solo, broad shoulders and a smirk that rests too easily on that always sober face, turns and stalks off.

Rey sets teeth to teeth and follows him.

…

The city isn’t as wide as she thought it would be. Or at least, the man with Kylo Ren’s face but not _quite_ his eyes moves quickly, catlike, through narrow spaces and under low-hanging doorways.

“Where are you taking me?”

“No use telling you until we get there.”

“I need to get…” She needs to get home. But she can’t tell him that. This is a dream, or an extended vision, and maybe it _is_ all about mirrors, and maybe that damnable Force is trying to tell her something. She squints at the sky. It’s still ashy clouds and hollow gray. _Luke Skywalker, is this you?_

Silence.

She can’t feel the bond, still. She can’t feel anything. It’s like she’s been dropped into an empty part of space, dangling between unfriendly stars, only she can’t open her eyes and the only answers she gets are the ones she can paint her behind her eyelids.

Oh, some days Rey misses Jakku.

Right now, she isn’t even sure if this is a day.

There’s little else to do but take in everything she can about Ben Solo, if it _is_ really him. She keeps up with him without much difficulty—his legs are longer, and he knows his way, but Rey is wiry and quick and does not tire easily. He is wearing a leather vest over a simple cotton shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows. Since they began their trek cross-city, he has slipped a half-glove on his right hand, well-tanned. A blaster guard? Or for some kind of crossbow?

The satchel over his shoulder is sharply lumpy in spots. When he pauses at the mouth of a street which opens onto the slum-tents that skirt around them, she reaches out to touch it. Once a scavenger, and all that.

“What’s this?”

Flash-quick, he smacks her hand away. Rey smacks back, because that is what she always does, and then he catches her wrist in his and spins her around so that they’re chest to chest. Thankfully it’s her good hand this time.

“Careful,” he says. “Thieving’s no way to start a friendship.”

“I’m just someone with questions,” Rey seethes. She can’t match that teasing grin, and she doesn’t like what it’s doing to her insides. A tug of _something_ , yes, but it’s a something that lands a little the right of her heart, at the center of her ribs. It is therefore _not quite_ what she needs. “I said nothing about being friends.”

“Hard to trust you when you’re angry like this.” Still that loose curve of his lips, maddening, irreparable. “What’s your name?”

“You already know it. It’s Rey.”

“Hmm.”

“The _real_ Rey.” She tugs free from him and folds her arms over her chest, glaring. At least he hasn’t yet noticed the lightsaber tied to her belt. Is this version of him even Force-sensitive?

(Is _she_?)

“See!”—and his eyes are sparking again, instead of deep with darkness. “See, that’s something she would say. Probably with her boot on my throat.”

“So you know her.” Rey blinks hard again, trying to clear the last of the sting from her eyes. “You know the crazy dark-side version of me?”

His face hardens a little. She hates that that’s what so familiar. “I’m not telling you anything. Still not convinced this isn’t that damned Jatoori gas, messing with my mind…” he breaks off into a mutter and shakes his head, picking up his swift pace again.

Rey keeps abreast of him, not wanting to tag along like a child. Children are all too easily left behind. “It was your idea, wasn’t it? The gas?”

“Needed a distraction.” He can shrug with his grin and his shoulders at the same time. “Now, Rey-not-Rey, time to explain yourself.”

They’ve reached one of the slum tents. Unlike the gray and black of the city, it is a patchwork of faded earth-tones. Rey is vaguely comforted by this.

Ben pauses, stoops, and says, “I don’t know why I’m trusting you.”

 _You never do._ Rey imagines hands outstretched. Imagines pressing at the corner of an invisible room that traps her mind and is her mind all at once, imagines that someone presses back. “Then don’t.”

He mumbles some retort and thrusts the expanse of his shoulders through the door-flap of the tent.

Rey follows. Inside, it’s reasonably large, shaped like a shanty. There’s the crackle of a fire, a smoke-way cut like a ship’s porthole.

Rey sees none of this.

Rey sees a leather jacket, a blaster cocked at knee-height, another face she’d know in any world.

Han Solo.

…

“ _Han_!” It bursts out of Rey’s throat like a sob. Always, at the worst moments, she forgets herself. Forgets everything that has happened around and to her, in the past few star-spanning hours. “You’re alive!”

Han’s on his feet, blaster pointed.  “‘Course I’m alive. Hutt’s breath, Ben, what are you doing bringing her here? Worked out so well last time, didn’t it?”

“Pop, it’s not—” Ben is, for the first time, truly flustered. “It’s not her. Just—looks like her.”

There’s no quantifiable time to explore this further, because the tent _shakes_ and Chewbacca bursts in, roaring in furious Wookiee.

Rey has never been frightened of him.

She remembers, this time, that he doesn’t know her.

“Chewie, I’m—I’m not here to hurt any of you,” she says, palms outward. She’s tempted to glare at Ben, who is being manifestly unhelpful, but that won’t aid her case for pacifism. “My name is Rey, but I’m not whoever…whoever that is. I know who all of you are. Han Solo, smuggler, and Chewbacca, and this is your son, B-Ben.”

“Keep talking,” Han growls. She can’t read him. This isn’t Han, softened by time, hardened by grief, and offering her a job on his ship. This isn’t the Han she knows. Rey only hopes that he still can be.

“I passed out, or—I don’t know, went into a trance on Takodana. I woke up here, and I saw…the one you all of think as Rey, and then I ran into Ben, and here we are.”

“That’s not all.” Ben clears his throat. “Tell him what you told me.”

Rey forces herself to remember that this isn’t Kylo Ren, and she doesn’t have to fight everything he says. But the prospect _is_ tempting. “Leia sent me.” She almost whispers it. “Leia sent me to Takodana, and I think she might understand…”

Han’s face twists. Rey’s only seen that expression once before, and it wasn’t on Han’s face. It was on Leia, after Starkiller Base.

Han turns away. He sets the blaster down and doesn’t answer Chewie’s rumble. He looks old, and Rey knows that he _is_ old, but that is the kind of thing nobody ever remembers about Han Solo.

“I’m sure she would, if she were here,” Han says. He waits a long, long time before he finishes. “Leia’s dead.”


	4. Chapter 4

_“Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine._  
  
_I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.”_

_\- Richard Siken_

Rey is alive. This is first and only thing that matters.

It should not—it should never be so. Anger drives through him like iron, catching painfully on all and any soft snags of hope. But this is the duality of his fractured heart: he can resent her hold over him and still cling to the relief that she has not left him yet.

 _She did leave you_.

He killed the monster beside them, if not the one that lives inside him, and he offered her his hand.

Did she know his heart would follow?

Did she care?

Crait and Takodana, it would seem, did not offer him all the time he needed to think through, to find how deeply Rey settled in his bones—she and her clinging gaze and her departing steps.

But was it the Force that ground time and space to so much spittle between teeth?

Or something else?

He traces the damp and heavy folds of his garments with tense fingers. Hosnian Prime is no more, and yet it rests firmly enough beneath his feet.

Something has happened, and something else has not.

…

Kylo finds his way out of the senator’s silent garden. It had not really been a garden anymore, anyway—the rubbery plants in their rectangular beds were the color of charcoal, and no birds were singing. The swarthy vines and choired trees of Takodana feel like they are a galaxy away.

In point of fact, they are.

…

Rey is not easily tracked; the essence of her is buzzing sharply in his ears and chest, but there is no direction. It is as if she is everywhere at once, not a single entity, but two. More than two?

His mind keeps settling on _two_.

Kylo claps his hands over his ears.

…

 _“The rot,”_ Leia said, _“Goes all the way to the center. Do you see?”_ And she carved the golden halofruit in half, so that Ben could see the festering green-black in twisted, itching veins.

It made his skin crawl. _“What do we do?”_

And she, brow uncreased, unaffected, had tossed it aside. _“It is no good. No point in trying to save it.”_

…

Someone might know him here.

This is his second thought: that his hulking form is feared, and his name known, in many corners of many worlds. As many corners, of course, to which he himself has spread it.

It might be pride; he would rather call it practicality. Then he realizes it is neither.

This is Hosnian Prime, and he is Kylo Ren, but not here.

 _Hosnian Prime no longer exists_.

A pebble catches under his foot.

He lifts his shoulders a little, and feels fear and freedom. There are no voices in his head, only Rey. No rot in his veins, only wonder.

But the scar is on his face and his father is dead—that he can feel, always—and he forgets to rejoice to find a world unblemished, still spinning in the galaxy it once littered with its own death.

Ben Solo’s heart climbs up to his throat.

Kylo Ren pushes it down.

…

_“Kid, what have you done?”_

He heard his father’s voice in pieces, sparking, stinging. Word by word, as chip by chip the broken glass drank deeply of the dents and tatters in his skin.

 _“The pain,”_ Ben said. _“It makes the voices go away.”_ There were too many voices, all of them in agony, and one that was soft—but not quite of its own accord.

_They are afraid of you, and of your power, young one…_

His father looked at him.

No one taught him the difference between sorrow and disappointment, not then, and not until long after.

 _“Ah, kid,_ ” Han sighed, and the very wind seemed to sift through him, turning him gray. _“There’s something wrong with you.”_

…

Beyond the gate there are more villas, more shell-like houses, stacked in twos and threes. The city rises, sometimes in sheer steps, sometimes in the lazy incline of uphill ground.

He pauses. The path before him stretches in two directions.

But just like many turnings today, the question is answered for him. The earth shakes with an explosion before he reaches a decision as to this main road; the ground shivers under his feet.

For a moment, he wonders if the freedom he felt a moment ago was just a mockery.

Maybe the Force has placed him in the near past.

Maybe the Starkiller is going to kill _him_.

Is it—justice? He saw the sky split red, and heard no screams.

(But that is death on a macro, morbid scale. Too large to be felt and too loud to be heard, and Han Solo died like that—a thunderclap and then a feather-fall and a never-ending break.)

In a moment he overcomes the foolish thoughts. He will not die here, not at this moment. The sky is still clear—if gray—and there is a fog rising in what he can see of the streets below, but no more strikes follow.

(In another life, perhaps—and this is another life, but he has never taken the chances offered him—he might have wandered out of the city, instead of further in.)

Now, he wants to know what has happened, and where and _why_ he is. The fog is reaching him in little creeping gusts, dissipated by the wind. It turns the air around him hazy, and his eyes prickle. He recognizes the tang of Jatoori gas, and his fingers stretch for his saber. It’s a classic scoundrel’s distraction—not harmful, only irritating.

And it gets everywhere.

He wishes for his mask. But on the day that he broke it, he felt as if it were already long gone.

He pulls his cowl over his face and steps out into the street, towards the hub of the disturbance.

There are other lifeforms here; he can sense them. He feels their hacking lungs and watering eyes. But no one interrupts his stride. The Hosnian citizens, such as they are, are crowded indoors and out of the way.

Yet, as he descends a little, near the gate between the upper and lower city, dust still hangs in the air.

Curious, he reaches out through the Force and runs smack into someone else’s rage.

_Rey._

…

Isolated, pristine, furious.

Something is not quite right but nothing is right here and Kylo doesn’t think twice; he runs. Up one alley, down another, looping back from the edge of the Senator’s villas to the low, staunch walls of a barricade compound that marks the split in this city between poor and privileged. Above even the senators’ dwellings, of course, the turrets of the city shine most brightly—polished, rather than sanded flat—but Rey is not among them.

He pushes a message, his most direct yet, into what he believes is the Bond.

_I’ll find you._

There are guards at the door of the compound; stormtroopers in white and black armor that he knows too well. He does not so much order them aside as he does flick a finger and watch them crumple.

The door clangs shut behind him like a sealed tomb.

Darkness closes around him. He pushes back the cowl, and finds uncertainty buried under urgency.

When her voice answers, it almost does not sound like hers. _Who dares find me?_

…

Memories can only sour with time. In the moments of their united battle—when Rey moved with him, through him, _against_ him—he longed for a future.

When the future came, it was not the one he wanted.

In the days since Crait, he has often wished to find himself back again, staring across sparks and mayhem, to Rey with the blade in her hands.

If he had run more quickly—caught her in his arms before she caught him in a question of destiny—if he had—

Memories are sour, and he spits them out.

At least he tries to.

…

He doesn’t need to hear the tramp of footsteps to know that she is coming. Not running, not quite, but close enough.

“What are you doing here?” Her voice finds the ragged edges of his scar and scatters over his soul.

Only—

Rey is not Rey.

He knows this like he knows his own heartbeat, like he knows black dreams and Snoke’s voice and the way Rey grits her teeth when she is angry.

And this is not Rey.

But her lithe form is the same, though laden with rich wool-velvet and a ruby like a dying star pinned at her breast. Her eyes are the same in shape and color, but the darkness in them is wider than his own darkness.

Rey, as ever, is stronger than she knows.

Only—

_Now she knows._

They are in a long, low hallway almost like the ones that track the perimeters of spaceships. Kylo holds up both his hands, palm outward, a gesture of peace.

The next moment he is on his knees.

He can hardly breathe, and yet her fingers have hardly twitched.

She comes close enough to touch him, and slides a black-gloved hand behind his neck. The leather is cold against his skin. Her fingers curl in his hair. It is a touch that even Kylo Ren can admit he has longed for. She tugs his head back fiercely, forcing his face to lift towards hers.

“You’re not him,” she murmurs, voice almost sing-song, but very, very cold. “That scar, that whimpering mass between your ribs. But your mouth—” She thumbs the width of his lip, tugging it down to bare his teeth. “The same.” His body responds but his heart does not. It is too cruel to be a lover’s touch.

Her hands leave him sharply and she stalks away from him, back turned. Yet he is powerless, still, frozen in place. He senses no exertion, no exhaustion. She is a star-system of strength. She is greater than he could ever be.

He speaks, because Kylo Ren is many things but he never wants to be a coward. “Rey.”

A quick turn, and a cock of her sharp chin. The white powder covering her face but for a few smears of black (and her _eyes_ ) lends her the air of a vengeful ghost.

(Not his Rey, but then again, is Rey his in any world?)

“You know me. You come from another world, and you know another me.” She bends her head, eyes hawklike and sparkling like black gems. She is probing his mind.

It hurts.

He fights.

She wins.

“A filthy little scavenger,” she whispers, and for a second, pain floods between them before she snaps away. She shakes her head, as though she is clearing it of cobwebs. “You, the dark lord, and she, the wildheart.” She palms one glove across the ruby below her collar, closing her fingers around it, but she turns in profile from him, shutting him out as effectively as if she has placed a layer of durasteel between the tendrils of their minds. “What a curious, pitiful little world you know.”

That makes him angry. His world—his wreckage—pitiful? No, it can never be that. If his world can be pitied, that means it is nothing.

And it cannot mean nothing.

It has always been easy, for him, finding anger. That is how Snoke found him, and found the things that lay beneath the pale skin of a frightened, hungry face.

In anger, he finds decision. if there is anything that is the same, he knows which wound into which he will press his will. He is not nothing. He is Skywalker, Vader, a rage that _his_ Rey could not wash away. “If you’re Supreme Leader,” he gasps out, each breath shorter than the last, “Where is Snoke?”

The wall between them drops, if only for a moment. She towers over him, somehow, though even on his knees his eyes are level with the curve of her ribs. “I killed Snoke the first moment I held a lightsaber in my hands,” Rey says, and her lips curl into something that Kylo knows is not really a smile. “I split his puny, wretched body in two and watch him fall.” Her eyes narrow, and his throat narrows, and she stalks closer, releasing him a little only when black spots crowd his vision.

Once more she reigns, drawing back, drawing back. Cold hands reach into his very center. They pry open the little caskets and secrets, inspecting with shivering, sharp intent. “You knew him too. Did his guards beat you? Did he flay your mind like he used to flay mine?”

She already sees the answer. It can be counted in years.

Rey lifts her chin, and lets go of the hold she has on him. His hands scrabble at the floor as he heaves, ungracefully, for a full gasp of air. “You were weak,” she says. It is not pity, but only because he is sure she is not capable of that. “You _served_ him.”

Kylo wonders if she feared Snoke, but he does not say it aloud.

Her stare is as deep and empty as the space between stars. “I only fear the things I have to.”

…

If Rey would only turn, he had told himself, they would rule side-by-side. She would put away the Rebel-hued softness that did not come to her by nature—rough-edged girl that she is. She would save the warmth of her heart for him and him alone.

She would find power and he would find honor, both unbridled.

He told himself, he _tells_ himself, that she threw this happy chance away.

He tells himself that it was something they both held in the first place.

…

She has not finished with him yet.

Once again, her mind surges into his mind, folding and unfolding like the rifled turn of so many pages. There are memories there he desperately does not want her to see.

It is different, somehow, than the things he hid from Snoke.

This is Rey, only, it is not Rey, and he does not want her to find and recognize the boy on his mother’s knee, the boy with his hands on the Falcon’s controllers with his father’s hands tight around them.

(For there were not only the soured memories of disappointment. Snoke would have called them so, but Snoke lied. There were memories shattered by time but no less shining—they were bright, and that was why he could not look at them in the dark.)

(Han used to toss him the air, shouting out landing directives. _Pull right, drop your wheel-gear—we’re in for a close one, Ben!_ And the boy would laugh and laugh.)

(Luke used to set a roughened hand on his shoulder and guide his eyes towards the stars. _They all have names, just like you_ , he would say, and the boy asked, _Were they alive once?_ only for Luke to smile as all those who know loss smile, and say, _They still are_.)

(Leia used to put her hands on his shoulders and their gazes, met, would burn. She would tell him of Alderaan, and would tell him of Luke’s daring escapades, and she would try to tell him that shouting still meant love, when it came to her and Han.)

 _In any world_ , he realizes, shamefully, just down a passageway of thought that she has not yet entered with her warrior’s stride and blade, _in any world_ , these are the things he would want to show Rey freely, in his own time.

For himself.

His lips part. Through gritted teeth, he hears his voice, a rattle and a prayer, whisper, _“Please_.”

She stops. This cold and vengeful woman with the eyes and voice that plagued him since long, long ago—

Stops.

“Ah,” she murmurs. He cannot help but ask himself if this Rey, in this other world, ever saw the island in her dreams. “Ben Solo, never Skywalker—you are the same in every world, aren’t you?”

She sends one image to him, but it is not hers to keep, it is his. It is Rey, with tears on her face and red light blazing around her like worship—

—leaving him.

The word left his lips then, too.

“Ben,” says the Rey he thought he wanted, dark and beautiful. “ _Please_ never works on me.”

She turns.

When Snoke turned, he struck Snoke down. When Han believed, he pierced him through the heart.

Rey does not fear him because she does not need to. “Guards!” she calls out, and her voice rings like steel striking steel, “Shackle him. I will question him again later.”

The stormtroopers who surround him are not Force-trained, but Kylo submits as they fasten linked cuffs to his wrists and ankles and half-march, half-drag him to a narrow cell almost at the center of the compound. Rey has shown no flicker of weariness, no need to refresh her strength, yet she leaves him.

It is the only thing that remains the same.

Somewhere, the terror of the First Order is bleeding on fresh snow. Somewhere, the boy whose father’s hands will never hold his again watches through a creature’s eyes as the gray body falls, sifted through with red light.

Somewhere, Ben Solo knows it was all for nothing, and has known that almost since the start.

His own devices are of little enough use now. He sags wearily against the chill gray floor, lifting cuffed hands to cradle his head. She has split him open—in mind, this time, instead of body—and left him shaking, seeking for a hold.

Her interest in him fades down the corridors of the compound even before she does. The only possible reason is no comfort at all:

He is not the one she wants.


	5. Chapter 5

_beyond anger or failure_

_your face in the evening schools of longing_

_through mornings of wish and ripen_

_we were always saying goodbye_

_\- Audre Lorde_

 

“Dead?” Rey gasps. “I don’t understand!”

But she does.

…

There are other endings.

Rey of Jakku remains of Jakku, perhaps, until the sand in its thousand cruelties has scraped the last of flesh from bone.

(Or maybe it is only her soul that will be scraped away, left sun-bleached and inexplicably rusted, cankerous, while her body trudges on.)

(The living never get to decide what is to die.)

But because there are other endings, perhaps Ben Solo is not the child corpse the monster leaves behind. It may be that Rey’s mind unspools earlier, younger, shaking walls seen and unseen, until the monster finds _her_.

And when Rey is Not-Rey, when Rey is blood and darkness—

It may be that Ben Solo is saved.

…

“Died not long after this one started crawling around,” Han says, jerking a thumb in Ben’s direction.

Rey does not know if this means a death in childbirth. Children are not often born on Jakku; people come and go, and some come alone and never leave. She flicks a cautious gaze to where Ben stands silently, arms bared casually to the elbow, folded over his chest. She watches for a wince or some other sign that his father’s words have hurt him.

There is none.

She realizes, watching them— _and they are not so different in the red glow of the fire, not so different at all from the red glow of that high-flung bridge, only_ —

She realizes that in _this_ ending, it is well between Ben Solo and his father, between Han Solo and his son.

They are watching her.

Han clears his throat, runs a hand over the silver-dark stubble on his chin. “So,” he says. “I take it, you’re not from around here?”

…

She doesn’t tell them everything.

 _If he was here—_ but Rey does everything that she can to hold the edges of her mind closed tightly. She dares not see if the Bond is open. She does not know if she can bear to find it, once more, inexorably shut.

“And you’re from Jakku.” Han grimaces in sympathy. Rey never asks for sympathy, but her heart opens to it all the same. “Nearly lost the Falcon there, in an unlucky game of sabacc.”

Ben cups a long, clever hand around his mouth and lets slip a false whisper. “The _nearly_ is where I come in.”

Han tells him to shut up, but affection slurs it to a sort of, _shaddupkid_ , all one word, and Rey feels that imploding softness between her ribs again.

“Parallel universes, got it,” Han pushes on, glowering at Chewbacca, who is continuing to rag on him in a variety of chortling chords. “You’re not Supreme Leader there. Light-sider if ever I saw one.” His gaze scans her, quick and fierce.

“That’s how I know—Leia,” Rey says.

Han melts a little, at that. Rey knows an ache, now, when she sees one. It used to be that she could only feel them in the dark.

Ben says nothing. His dark eyes are on her, but she will not cringe at the weight of that gaze.

_You’re not alone._

She jolts, shivering under her own skin, but it is nothing. A memory, an echo—not a touch.

“Leia is a general,” Rey answers, to Han’s waiting glance. “She’s leading the Resistance.”

“They’re alive and kicking here, too.” Han’s eyebrows waggle. “Rarely both at the same time.”

“You’re not—you’re not with the Resistance?” Maybe it shouldn’t surprise her, but it _does_.

Ben sits down next to his father on a low bench, almost shoulder-to-shoulder, and rests one elbow on his knee. “No money in morals, sweetheart.”

Anger surges up in Rey, and then recedes like the tide, leaving her lonely. “What does money have to—”

“Ignore him.” Han smacks his son’s tousled head, but Rey notices that he doesn’t correct Ben’s statement. “So, Leia’s alive. She sent you here, through space and time? Can’t have any version of me going back to my thieving ways, can she.” The look on his face is fond, almost peaceful, but it then it falls again into sadness. “I’m gone there, aren’t I?”

Rey nods, stricken. “She—she misses you.”

There’s a short pause. Ben is looking at the ground. Han is looking at Rey, but she thinks he’s seeing someone else.

Chewie, grown impatient, wants to know how Rey came here.

“I think—the Force sent me,” Rey explains.

Ben lifts his head. She reminds herself that he is not the one who killed his father in an attempt to kill himself. “So you’re a Jedi.”

“Not really.” Her minds strays to Luke, to Leia, all alone. “Not—yet.”

Ben shifts, so that his clasped hands rest loosely between his knees. “Who am I?”

“What?” It’s the question Rey will not—cannot—answer.

His eyes are as dark as she remembers. He does not know her here. He has not clashed her soul with the gravity and strength of his own, torn between fire and ice. She has not written a future—any future—across his face or through the touch of their hands. He might as well be a stranger, with an enemy’s face.

(If only it were that simple.)

“You’re part of the war,” she answers, at last. It takes a good deal to keep her voice steady. It takes even more to deny her own mind an explanation of why she chooses that particular lie. “You want change in the galaxy, there.”

She is not defending Kylo Ren, because Kylo Ren cannot hear her. No, this is entirely different—this is trying to convince Ben Solo, unbroken and yet still corrupted in some way, that he ought to take a different path.

 _You were spared here,_ Rey thinks. _You were spared_. _But what have you done with that freedom?_

Chewie asks Han what they’re going to do.

Han stares at Rey, and then he turns to Ben. “You got what you came for, didn’t you?”

Ben’s mouth works a little—the faintest quiver of those full lips. Rey has seen that look before. She never—

She never thought she’d see it again.

Wordlessly, he tosses Han his satchel.

“What’s in that?” Rey demands.

Two skeptical pairs of eyes are again trained on her. She huffs out a sigh. “I’ve told you everything about me.” This is not strictly true, but Rey has grown a little used to gray.

“Kyber crystals,” Han says, apparently satisfied. “Our bread and butter.”

Chewie scoffs, _you wish_ , and Han shakes a finger at him. “Bread and butter for a _year_ , fuzzball!”

Rey swallows, hard. She is used to disappointment. It still stings.

“We got what we need,” Ben says brusquely, rising again. It is not really an answer to his father’s question. Rey has questions of her own, but does not ask them. Not yet. “We should go.”

“She’s thrown a wrench in our plans. Worse than a Wookiee making repairs.” Han sucks at his teeth for a moment, thinking hard. “Hard to know what it means.”

Ben’s smile is a little too sharp, and hides a little too much. “You’re worried about the Force?”

“You should be!”

That settles Ben.

Nothing, she fears, can settle Rey. She sits cross-legged, hands clamped on her knees, and waits for a Han Solo who doesn’t know her to render out some kind of a plan. A plan that doesn’t involve the Resistance, or helping a cause, or—

“Luke,” he says. “Tomorrow, we’re leaving. Luke will know what to do.”

…

Han and Chewie take the crystals, a canteen, and Chewie’s bowcaster back to the Falcon. Rey could go with them, but she wants to wait until morning to see the ship. She needs sleep. She needs _something_ , but what she ends up with is this: sitting a flame-flicker away from Ben Solo, who is sneaking unreadable glances at her.

“You hungry?”

“I could eat.”

In every world, it seems, it is difficult yet natural to speak to him. Here, his face is wide open. She can look into his eyes without fear.

(Only, Rey is not afraid of Kylo Ren.)

(She is afraid of herself.)

He rummages in their packs for food, straightens up, offers her a ration of dried meat.

“Did you never…even _think_ of becoming a Jedi?” she asks.

Ben Solo _laughs_.

Rey bites her lip.

“No,” he says, tipping his chin back. His shirt gapes below his throat, hinting at the broad chest beneath. Rey swallows, remembering a moment when—

Well. That is the least of her worries.

“Uncle Luke tried to convince me. But what a bore, right? Temples, scrolls, no attachments.” He tilts a dangerous eyebrow in her direction. “You know that rule, right? There’s a lot of long, cold nights in the galaxy. No wonder you’ve been putting it off.”

Rey wishes she could project herself, bodily and instantaneously, outside into the waiting dark. For a moment—a moment that she does not willingly permit herself, but that surges through her all the same—she misses the ache in his eyes. That way the line of his mouth works, opens, _yearns_.

For all that Kylo Ren walks in darkness, she misses his heart.

 _Murderer, monster, killer_ , she reminds herself, but the words are blows. She might as well strike her fists against the ground until she breaks her hands.

(She cannot believe it, try as she might.)

All of this passes, and she has not moved. She has not clambered to her feet and reached up to strike him across the face, though she wants to.

She always wants to mark him.

Rey bites her tongue.

…

“Where is Luke?” she asks, when Han and Chewie return.

Han is cleaning grease off his hands with a rag so greasy it can surely do no good. “Somewhere we’ll need lightspeed to get to.”

Ben stifles a yawn. “Pop’s superstitious. Thinks talking about Luke wakes up some…malevolent force in _the_ Force.”

“Can’t be too careful,” Han growls.

Ben just slides Rey a teasing grin. She feels her cheeks warm.

Han sets aside his blaster, his vest, and tosses Rey a bedroll. “Better turn in, Supreme Leader.” It’s said with almost the same affection he shows to Ben. It tears at something deep in Rey, something she’s had to bury back _there_ , where Han Solo may very well still be falling, where Luke Skywalker is one with the Force.

“If your blanket’s too small,” comes Ben’s voice, rasping close and warm, “We can share.”

Han and Chewie are, thankfully, not listening.

Rey makes a snap decision. They’ve never been her best, but she doesn’t know what else to do. She seizes Ben Solo by the elbow and half-drags, half-marches him outside the shack.

“What?” He’s got an eyebrow lazing up, just like his father’s, but with that scoundrel edge that she’s only heard ever stories about. “Something you want to say to me alone?”

Rey grits her teeth. Through them, she says, “I’m not her.”

Ben Solo goes silent and perfectly still.

…

There are other endings.

Rey is starting to wonder, though, if all beginnings are the same.

…

“Sit down.”

“In the dust?” He is playing for time.

 _I’ll make you kneel._ She almost spits out the words, and she shakes under the pressure of them. They are not her words. Rey closes her eyes, centers herself. Does not— _dares not_ —ask what (who) can try to put words in her mouth, here.

“Just—sit. Please.”

He does, and looks up at her. Ky—Ben, with his eyes lifted towards her face and his lips parted, is painfully familiar. Rey sits down beside him, back against the uneven wall of the shack, so that she does not have to see him look like _that_.

_But not to me._

“What do you want to know?”

“The one who looks like me,” Rey ventures. A gamble, and like all gambles, she is in freefall until the thought hits ground. “You and she—”

“It’s not like that.” He sounds immediately, immensely bitter.

_Rey, join me._

Memories, memories.

Rey takes a breath, and leaps off her own cliff. “But you want it to be.”

“I thought she could leave, once.” He does that thing again, where he raises his chin star-ward, eyes reflecting whatever light they catch. “I thought she’d come with me.”

(There are other endings.)

“And she didn’t.”

“Power.” The word is no less harsh for how softly he speaks it. “Power means more to her than—than a few stolen kisses with a smuggler’s son.”

 Rey’s hands are rough. These are sand-scars, fine and jagged. There are callouses along her palms from holding her staff and her scrap and the saber. These are the hands that were not enough, in the end.

_Join me._

_Please._

She cannot think of _him._ But if this Rey has anything, anything that is still hers—“Maybe she doesn’t know what she wants. I don’t, always.”

“Ah yes, the Jedi indecision.” He grants her a sideways glance, flash-quick. This Ben Solo is much more his father’s son than _he_ ever knew how to be (at least, she believes that is what _he_ believes). “ _She_ knows, Rey. She killed Snoke, and set herself up as leader. She may not have killed me yet, but not for lack of trying.”

_Do you think that by some kind of trick you can deceive me? For one who does not want anything from me, every step you take reeks of desperation._

Rey-not-Rey’s words in the city flood Rey’s consciousness, dripping with ice.

_For one who does not want anything from me…_

“She thought you were tricking me,” Rey says. “I saw her, and she saw me—and she thought it was you.”

His forehead creases. “What do you mean?”

“A…Force-trick, I suppose.” Rey’s hand scrabbles over pebbles and dust. Both are softer than sand, but sometimes Rey misses sand. Misses believing in a horizon that she couldn’t quite see. “Do you—are you a Force-user?”

“I could be. I choose not to.” His face changes; it is like the removing of a mask. “My mother didn’t want that for me.”

_And Snoke did not tempt you here, and Leia is gone…_

Rey does not know quite why this hurts her, but it does. Before she can say anything else, it is his turn to pin her to an inner point.

“You thought the same thing.”

Rey’s mouth opens and closes.

“You thought I was someone else. Something else.” His eyes are boring through her now, dark and hot. “In your world, do you love me? Do I love you?”

Rey is foolish. She has always been foolish, at the very first moment she could afford to be, and sometimes even before that. Because she is foolish, she mirrors his words of a moment ago. “It’s not like that.”

And with his father’s triumphant charm, he parries back: “ _But you want it to be_.”

…

Rey sleep as far away from Ben Solo as their cramped quarters will allow. This puts her close to Chewie, who snores.

After Ben said—well, what he said, and what she said, but not what she wanted to _hear_ —Rey had been silent for a moment, and then stalked back in without another word.

In other words: if this was a game of sabacc, she’d have lost her ship.

…

Somewhere she does not know and cannot see, Kylo Ren lets go—

—only for a moment.

…

Rey breathes. And then, like a pebble dropped into a well, somewhere dark and deep, she lets go—

—only for a moment.

…

Her fingertips tangle in matted hair. Rey feels the kind of stickiness that only comes with blood. She almost snatches her hand back.

Almost.

She steadies her wrist and traces down. Damp skin, slashed across with a faint, raised line that she _knows_ —

(that she made)

Rey stops. Stops reaching, stops breathing. But what is life without breath?

She moves again. Beneath her touch, broken lips part.

_Rey…_

…

Rey holds her hand close to her chest, fingers sheltered by the palm of her other hand, as though she has been burned.

The Bond is singing, singeing. She feints at closing it, and finds that she cannot.

He’s _here_. He followed her, or she followed him.

They go not one, without the other.

The constellation of her own mind traps her—he is here, he is _hurt_ , he can feel her too.

_Rey._

She will not speak to him. Not now. Not when she lies in the same room as his father, who only lives because _there are other endings, there are other futures, there are worlds where you did not fail, or fall—_

 _Rey._ It’s more urgent this time.

_Did you come to kill me?_

His silence is strung tensely between them.

Did _you?_

_No._

_But you’re angry._

_I…was._

_I’ve heard this before._ A tear leaks out of the corner of her eye, tracking its way through sweat and dust. Clean. _You want me when you think you can have me._

She can feel the stutter and the ache even before he speaks again.

_You have to leave._

There had been blood in his hair, on his face. Slowly, Rey unfurls her hand from its protective huddle. She reaches out, and finds what she thinks is his sleeve. She prays it is not his chest, but tries to keep _that_ thought below the line of their communication. She drags her fingers down, feeling firm muscle beneath the dampened, heavy cloth of his perpetual uniform.

_Deep breaths…_

_What?_

_Nothing._

Cold metal. It rings through the Bond. There are shackles binding his wrists.

Kylo Ren is a prisoner.

He sounds darkly humorous when he speaks again. _A fair turnabout, don’t you think?_

_Where are you?_

_I could have killed you, on Crait._ His guilt throbs like a wound. Or maybe it pulses like a heartbeat. They have always felt the same to Rey.

_You didn’t. I was too fast for you._

_In_ his _ship, weren’t you?_

She doesn’t answer that. _We’re not in our world._

_I know. Believe me._

A sudden, impish suggestion occurs to Rey. Before she can recoil from it, she thrusts it through the Bond. _Are you with her?_

His answer crackles back: _How did you know?_

_So you are._

_In a way._

She shouldn’t feel the little flaming snarl of triumph. But Rey is far from perfect at heart. She only ever tries, and even then, her best chance has always been surviving. _She bested you, didn’t she? In any world, I best you._

 _I’ll have my hands on you again someday_ , he retorts, and though he sounds more like his old self, it’s not quite a threat. It’s…

Rey’s face floods with heat. But before she can shape another thought, he snaps back again.

_Rey, leave. You’ve got to leave._

And she feels him heave his drained strength to put up a wall between them, stone by aching stone.

Numbly, she recognizes the only possible reason: someone is coming. _She_ is coming.

He’s trying to protect her.

Rey lies frozen, breath trapped somewhere in space. On Crait, after their…parting…he had been a knife thrown blindly, a wave of darkness and anger and the ugliest parts of youth and passion.

Is he too tired and beaten for that now, or has something else changed?

No matter what Leia’s eyes say, no matter what the Force promises is in its fickle, shaking gusts, no matter what Luke Skywalker feared—Rey can never know. She never sees inside the whole of Kylo’s— _Ben’s_ —heart. She only feels it pulse beneath her fingertips.

And that is how she knows that she cannot leave him behind.


	6. Chapter 6

_and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium_

_or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star_

_in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving_

_from its earthwards journeys, here where there is_

_no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,_

_when there was snow)_

_\- Robert Philen_

When Ben is seven years old he makes the jump to lightspeed by his father’s side, teeth rattling. It is the first time Han has done so with him in tow.

Leia, afterwards, is furious.

There is a sensation then, never felt quite the same way again because half of it is a sensation of the unknown—and he hates it.

He hates it, though he is a pilot’s son.

It is best described—though Ben has always been more inclined to practice the shapes of other languages with his treasured pens than to record his own adventures—as everything dropping backwards.

Sound snatched from behind one’s ears. A gust of the strongest wind, maybe, but deadly still all the same.

And then, on the other side, on the way out, the hum and rush of everything settling back in. Planetfall, and sounds and smells and sights too overwhelming (yet proportionately insignificant) to belong in outer space.

When Ben Solo kills his father in a last and mad attempt to kill himself, it is much like this: sound and heart and hope all dropping backwards.

(He hates it.)

…

His head jerks forward, a painful snap of neck and spine that will ache for days, if there are days left in his future. For all that he has honed a clever and ponderous mind at the feet of masters, willing and unwilling, he now thinks himself a fool.

A fool at least, to the woman before him.

She has held him immobile with one half-raised hand while her troopers beat him about the face and landed heavy kicks to his ribs. She has dropped to one knee before him, her fingers twisting his matted hair.

“You are hiding something,” she murmurs, and presses a finger, soaked in his blood, to her lips.

He did not know Rey when she was lonely on Jakku, though he felt her in his heart. He saw the hard edges first, eyes unsoftened by tears, _Get out of my head_ , and he seeks traces of those same edges now.

It is almost a sense of obligation.

It is wholly unsatisfying. Snoke must have done it. Must have snatched up the aching prism of her soul from the desert and coaxed out an agony of ambition and flame.

Snoke did the same with Ben Solo.

…

He is not weak.

Broken, yes. Fissured from one edge of his soul to the other, scarred by the lashes of Snoke’s infernal training and by the wild light of Rey, carved open in face and heart.

But when yet another Supreme Leader—the one with _her_ face—presses deep into the filaments of mind and memory, he will not give.

She will take, but he will not give.

Running and hiding will not last, but his walls will not be enough to stop her—not in his current state, so running and hiding must suffice.

(And what current state is that? This: a soul rubbed raw and ragged by the tears on another Rey’s face, by the subliminal and the sublime, by Luke Skywalker going, gold, and gone.)

Cold, gloved fingertips claw against the river-line of his scar. _Her_ scar.

She inhales deeply.  “ _I_ gave this to you.”

And before he can answer or deny, she shakes her head. In what little light there is, her raiment shimmers darkly.

He waits, stifling harsh breaths between clenched teeth. His teeth are rattled, but none are loose. A small mercy.

He tastes salt in his mouth.

When she speaks next, it is in the clear and ringing words of command.  “Release him.”

Two troopers stump forward, loosing his bonds. His wrists ache. He stands unsteadily. He is walking wounded, and he does not know if she means to cast him out to crawl and drag his way through the streets, or if she means to kill him on his feet.

Perhaps a bit of both.

In a smooth twist of her fingers, a blaster from a trooper’s holster snaps to her hand. She fires, once, precisely.

He is broken, not weak. He blocks the blast and deflects it, but not before it has scorched a deep rut in the flesh of his right shoulder.

She smiles. It is an awful thing.

Then she turns her back, and leaves him.

…

His father was never afraid of him.

Not like he wanted him to be.

Han Solo, smuggler, shuffling between crumbled kingdoms with less inspiration than just pure _verve_ , or whatever it was that had netted Leia and so much prestige in the first place.

Of course, Ben knew—he heard the stories. Of course Ben understood—his father’s calloused hand, wrapped around his, was _safety_ , pure and simple.

But nothing was ever simple—least of all Skywalker blood.

There was a shadow that burned and grew, the backdrop of something not quite a flame. And Han kept trying to explain, as though _he_ could understand, as though his promises would answer the ageless voices that chased one another around the edges of Ben’s dreams.

 _Your uncle will train you_ , Mother—Leia—said. Dark eyes on dark eyes, and Han standing to the side with his chin and shoulders slumped. An old man, Ben had thought at the time, though later he would change his mind. _He will help you._

 _Your fault_ , Ben shouted— _shouts_ , still, of nights, of nightmares. And he shouted it at Han, not at Leia, whose fault these shadows were.

_(Skywalker blood.)_

_Your fault!_

He remembers that Han winced, at those words, and said nothing.

…

Freedom is an illusion.

Snoke taught him this, and it seemed a kindness at first. It seemed a kindness because it _was_ an answer, because Ben Solo could run and hide but such things do not last forever.

And later, when Snoke’s voice echoed and ravaged, when the barbed punishments flamed across Kylo Ren’s skin, the words rang no less true.

_Ben, please. Don’t do this._

He stumbles out of the compound, battered, singed, bleeding. The streets are all but empty, though no soldiers parade their depths. The people are afraid.

And he was drawn to Rey as he always is, but that, too, was an illusion.

 _Freedom is an illusion_.

Snoke was a liar. Maybe he learned that long ago.

_She would have known the same lies._

He does not doubt, feet dragging through gray dust, that she freed him for a reason. He thinks of Hux’s bone-like features curled into a grin, setting loose a wounded party of Twi’leks for the sport of dead-eyed troopers, back from a battle of heavy losses. They fled into a dense forest, he remembers, of whatever planet they were crouching on, and the troopers pounded after them, blasters and blades in hand.

In twilight, they brought back the bodies.

 _A little light victory_ , Hux said, and his eyes were almost red with the shades of the setting suns. _It lifts the spirits of any army._

So.

On this forgotten land, he has been set loose for a reason. Maybe the troopers will follow him down the Hosnian streets. Or maybe, just maybe—the Supreme Leader has her sights set higher, on another prize.

Yes, Kylo realizes. That must be the reason.

He is only the bait.

…

He could have gone with her. He could have saved her precious fleet, and crawled back to her precious Resistance, and then—

What? Waited, chained in a gray dungeon while his fate was decided? Met her eyes one last time before the executioner’s blade fell?

Maybe they would do it with a lightsaber, for irony’s sake. He imagines the crackle of plasma through flesh and bone, imagines dying, imagines darkness.

There is no peace, no golden sunset beyond life.

Not for him.

He has to get out of this city. His shoulder is bright with pain, and his ribs are little better. His lips are split and bleeding, and his left eye is swollen.

All around him, the Force is simmering. Pain, he knows, will do that.

_Ben?_

He halts, hands clenched in the muddy-colored robes he was stealing from an abandoned stall. He thought a disguise, for his face and for his wounds, would help. At least until he found some kind of shelter—

_Ben. I know you’re there. Is it safe?_

Bait. He’s bait. _For her_ , he realizes. For the scavenger who wrote a future and a threat from cheek to brow, who cannot be hidden by a desert.

Rey wants Rey.

 _It’s_ not _safe_ , he grits out, since the Bond is open. He focuses his mind on throwing up every shield he can, siphoning off the blooming warmth of her connection from prying eyes that might follow him and his bruises and his blood. _She’s looking for you._ And it is his fault, isn’t it? In a moment of half-consciousness, his heart called for her…he reopened the Bond here, just to see if he could…

And now she may suffer for it.

 _For me? But I thought she’d captured_ you _._

They are not allies. He would have killed her on Crait, it has to be so, because the alternative is something far too tender, as only wounds can be. They are not allies, and it does not matter that they are trapped in a world that is neither past, present, nor future—

He grits his teeth against his pride. They are sore, from the troopers’ blows and from something else. _This was a mistake. Close the bond. You’ve done it before._

He trembles—shakes—when he feels the press of her palm against his jaw. _She hurt you, didn’t she? Why?_

_Why not? She’s you._

_She is_ not _me._ The spark of her anger yields a different sort of sting; he is hungry for it, leaning into this particular pain. _I would have thought you two would be allies._

_There can be only one Supreme Leader, Rey._

He has been standing in this stall, stone-like, since the moment she said his name. A fool, just as he feared. He snatches up the cloak and wraps it around himself, a movement that takes effort from his seared shoulder. If he can put distance between himself and the Empress (is _that_ what she is, or only what he thought he wanted her to be?), between himself and the real Rey…

What then? He can die?

It would be justice, no doubt.

 _Tell me where you are. I’ll find you. We’ll_ … There is something fizzling, uncertain, on her end. Maybe it seems too much the same as when she came to him before. He will never forget how his heart stopped when she gazed up him, wide-eyed, trusting, hands folded in offering.

 _Freedom is an illusion_. And so he ordered that her hands be bound.

It feels like a long, long time ago.

He pushes away every thought—all lonely pasts and all possible futures. _I’ll say this only once more, Rey. She is trying to find you. You have to close the connection. Leave me to myself._ And again, he bites out, because he has always been a little cruel when he is hurting— _You’ve done it before._

 _Stop that,_ she snaps. Not even a pause to allow him the empty peace of knowing she was safe, away from him. _I’ve found—_ a cloud, confusion, _shield_ , she is hiding _something_ but he has no time to guess at what— _I’ve found allies. But you shouldn’t be trusted, so I’ll come to you alone. This isn’t real, Ben. It can’t be. You and I are the only real things here—we’ve got to find how to…break this curse, or whatever it is._

She is so unschooled. She speaks of myths and children’s stories. _Curses_. He would laugh, except that somewhere (not here, perhaps) the whole legacy of his family is a curse.

_No._

_Is that an order, Supreme Leader?_ It is all mockery, but the blood rushes hot in his veins all the same.

_Would it matter if it was?_

The Bond snaps closed, but without any promises from her. He closes his eyes around a vision he stole from her: Rey, descending into the depths of rust and history on Jakku, finding something to save.

He has to get out of the city.

It is only moments later, when he has passed through a dozen streets, as the noise begins to swell through the air, the noise of normalcy returning, that he realizes.

He watches the people leaving their houses, still cautious, and he marvels.

She still called him _Ben_.

…

In this world, Rey must have suffered. _He_ bears scars from childhood, from the havoc of ghosts who were more than ghosts. And yet now, time and again, he imagines someone worse off than he was: no Leia, no Luke, no Han. A starved scrap of a child on Jakku, hands over her ears, listening to the wind howl—

And something that was not the wind.

Snoke made survival seem like salvation.

To a lost boy or an orphaned girl, perhaps it was.

…

The city’s main gate is guarded, but Kylo quickly observes that security marches along the length of the main road, and that the slums that gather at the outskirts of the metropolis are not so closely watched.

He makes his way among them, uncertain where his weary feet are leading him. Luke would tell him to follow the pull of the Force.

Anger coils within him, but it is a waste of energy.

Luke used to say that too.

And then—

_Han Solo._

It is heat and horror, the pain of tenderness all over again, his father’s hand on his face and his father as Kylo (Ben) has never seen him before and will never see him again, falling, silent.

His father must be dead in every world.

(Must be.)

He reaches out with every tendril of thought, searching in shameful desperation, but whatever spark he felt or thought he felt gutters out like a flame.

At length, he presses a hand, ungloved, to his forehead. It is damply hot. He must be feverish—wounds will do that. He is feverish, and weak flesh will often answer what the heart—

_No. Not what matters. Never, never what matters._

He trudges onward. The low houses of lesser townfolk turn to rag-covered hovels and sagging tents. This is not a happy world.

Even without him in it.

…

On Starkiller, he remembered. When the blade flew to her hand, the world, cold across, seemed swept with the sudden warmth of things past.

As a child, before the voices began, he felt the tiny bird-flutter of a heartbeat next to his. In the years that followed, as he grew taller and hollower, plagued by the unseen, he felt (once, twice) a small hand slip through his.

Yes, there was a girl.

She came to him of a night, before Luke Skywalker raised a blade above him, and her hands burned blue.

He lifted back the cowl from her face, and forgot it.

Snoke took all that from him.

Her face lit blue in the glow of his grandfather’s lightsaber gave it all back.

…

Outside Hosnian Prime’s capital is…another city. But it is several miles off—Kylo recalls that this is a cosmopolitan planet, that the once-glamorous hubs are connected to each other by cleanly paved roads, and all that spans between them is the occasional bend of a wide river. The slums crawl down the riverbank, where the boat-merchants dock their crafts and are always seeking hands to help unload.

Chewie carried him on his shoulders once, among the boats.

These cities glittered then. Now, they are dull in daylight.

The river is bridged by landing ports for all manner of crafts. In Kylo’s hearts beats _Han Solo_ , sharp and staccato, and he finds himself looking for the Falcon even though it is the last thing he wants to see.

It must be midday. He wonders if he saw the end of an eve-to-morning curfew. He wonders how long he was held captive—it felt like it could have been a few hours, or a few days.

 _A night must have passed, at least_.

Keeping his Force signature and all the edges of his mind as contained as he can, he measures what has happened. Takodana turned upside down. Another world, another Rey.

But Rey herself is also here, speaking to him.

 _The Force_ , he thinks bitterly, but with the kind of bitterness that tucks away a ration of hope. _The Force is testing us both_.

But whose desires are being punished? He saw the Rey he thought he wanted; she nearly killed him.

 _Always you, young Solo_. Snoke’s dead voice rises in his thoughts. _Always you are weak, and what is weak must be destroyed._

Snoke is dead.

Kylo refuses to answer.

…

“You want to buy a boat?”

The last time Kylo saw an Ishi Tibb was at a Senatorial gathering. It is strange to see the skeptical, uneven face above the rough-weave of a commoner’s garb.

“I want passage down the river.” He thinks of using the Force, but does not trust himself.

“Half an hour ago you were asking about fuel for a ship,” grumbles the Tibb, shrugging its broad shoulders. “Judging from that bruise on your face, someone must have stolen your spaceship.”

Kylo opens his mouth and shuts it again. _Half an hour ago?_

Perhaps he never would have guessed the truth.

It turns out he does not need to.

“ _Kylo?_ ”

The voice comes from behind, but he would know it anywhere.

He wheels around, forgetting the Tibb, the boat, the dangers of letting the Force pass through him at its full strength.

 _Rey_.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience! Needed to finish law school.

_I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,_

_That now are wild and do not remember_

- _Sir Thomas Wyatt_

 

His dusty clothes are dark with blood at shoulder and hip. His face is battered, eyes, feverish.

Rey stands in daylight, and feels her hand go cold.

Kylo falls at her feet.

…

For a moment she foolishly believed it to be voluntary. But even his sense of pageantry has limits; when she stoops down beside him, his eyes are closed. He’s breathing shallowly.

And Rey has so much to explain.

An hour ago—no, was it two? The day cycle seems different here—she ground her teeth and lied a little. “ _We have to wait._ ”

Han eyed her skeptically. “ _And here I thought you wanted out of this place._ ”

She does. Or she doesn’t know what she wants until she finds him. Isn’t that the trick? “ _I’ve sensed…a disturbance in the force. There’s someone I have to save._ ” Someone she has tried to kill before, who is still (presumably) trying to kill her, but that is beside the point.

It took some convincing. These Solo men have haunted smiles; they have all the tangled cynicism of the scavenger life.

They may well leave her, or try to kill her, and kill the one with Ben Solo’s face.

She will stop them, if she has to.

She does not want to. There is too much—there is too much of Rey’s heart here, for all of them. She cannot even tell herself what that means.

…

The Ishi Tibb is all concern and interest, and Rey pays him off with a coin she filched from Ben Solo’s purse just this morning. (He saw her doing it, and allowed it anyway. She does not think _friend_ is quite the right word.)

Kylo hasn’t moved.

 _Don’t you die,_ she thinks angrily, _don’t you leave me here._

A murmuring warmth answers, and Rey starts back, cheeks hot. She hadn’t realized that she sent that through the bond.

He weighs so much. He’s tall—a full head taller than her—and broad-muscled. His hair, matted, presses against her cheek and his when she draws him up against her. She doesn’t know, exactly, what the point is of always categorizing these observations, but so it is.

Fully limp, he is more than she can bear. Rey supposes that the Force would help her, but in Kylo’s last warnings he had been so adamant that the Supreme Leader was looking for her. She doesn’t dare call attention to herself by levitating another Supreme Leader, however in need of care he is.

Han and Ben were following her at a distance. She knows this, and she waits for them to make an appearance. The wharf is sandy and narrow; there are bushes not so many lengths away. Rey drags Kylo by the shoulders. Perhaps she should have asked the Tibb for help.

…

She dreams about him. She does, and she should not, should never have let the sight of his face, lit blue and red and _wondering_ , intrude upon her like it does. Rey imagined the warmth of his hand long before he stretched out to her. They are bound together, and she knew that sooner than she believed.

If everything the Force bond has sent her is true, he dreams of her too.

_It’s not like that._

She slumps, arms screaming with tension, no nearer to the bushes than before. She is strong, but not this strong. And they are alone here—what does it mean?

…

Footsteps behind make her turn. Han and Ben, side by side, matched in stride in a way that makes her chest ache, are hastening towards her. She’d thought them mercenary only the night before. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Hearts are still hearts. And here they are, not running. Trusting her vague words and coming to help her.

All the same, she tugs a fold of Kylo’s cloak over his face.

“Who in all Hoth is this?”

Rey is frozen. She has no plan, no answers. She has no way to explain that Han Solo is about to see the face of the son who killed him, the son whose path was set by fate and darker things.

“Please,” she hears herself say. Heard it, too, from Kylo’s lips—it might as well be a lifetime ago.

Ben’s eyes narrow. Before she can stop him, he springs forward, and pulls back the cloak.

…

Between the two Solo men, they carry him back to the ship.

(Rey wonders if he knows the touch of his father.)

Ben was angry and Han was quiet.

“Why wouldn’t you tell us?”

“It’s complicated,” Rey spat back. “I told you there was another you. I wasn’t sure if he was here…I mean, I knew he must be. I can…sense it.” She doesn’t want to explain the Force Bond. There are, in fact, many things she does not _want_ to explain. Whether it is to keep herself safe or Kylo safe, whether she should be concerned for his safety at all, is a different question.

“He gonna kill us?” Han asked. Rey set her jaw. It hits too close to home, if only he knew.

“He’s badly injured,” she said. “At the hands of your Supreme Leader.”

Ben winced, at that. But Han just nodded, stopped, and slung one of Kylo’s arms over his shoulder.

“C’mon, Ben.”

She sees him, in his known but unknown face. She sees _Kylo_ , all of a sudden—something dark and uncertain. Even angry. Ben Solo does not know what lies ahead, and that makes him afraid.

“I just want to get us back home,” Rey whispers. If she speaks louder, her voice might shake. She doesn’t want that. Sand-rats of Jakku are even less inclined to whine than Jedi. “I think I might need him for that.”

Ben Solo stoops, and lifts Kylo’s other arm.

…

_Rey…_

_Wake up_ , she urges him. He’s calling to her, because of course he is, because nothing makes sense anymore, in this tilted world, except that Kylo will try to reach her through the Bond.

His eyes stay shut.

They’re on the Falcon. Ben is brooding in a corner, arms folded over his chest, but Han is making himself useful and gathering what they have stocked in their medpac. Bandages, and some bacta patches. Not much else.

…

On Jakku, burns and scrapes are common. Broken bones are dangerous things. Deserts take and take and take. The weak perish and the forgotten remain so.

Rey’s hands are calloused and ungentle. An unlucky fall from a freighter carcass once snapped her wrist. She splinted it herself and keened over it for weeks, not quite crying.

It is always better not to cry.

Rey stills her trembling hands, poised to mend the wounds of her never-quite-enemy, and gets to work.

…

He isn’t waking up. Rey grinds her teeth and prods his shoulder. She can’t bring herself to touch his face, to find the raised edge of the scar she put there. _This is necessary_ , she reminds herself, which is foolish enough on its own, and begins to tear open his shirt, stiff with blood and dirt.

He murmurs something but doesn’t open his eyes.

“He’s exhausted,” Han says, low, beside her. His lined face reveals nothing for the moment. He’s just a frown and a steady gaze, not so different from usual.

Rey remembers that she misses him, remembers that the man lying quietly before her is the reason that she must.

Han knows none of this. Han is looking at a son who is not his son, and all of a moment his hand is on Rey’s shoulder, a comforting grip.

“Must be a mess, back where you’re from.”

“It’s a mess here, too,” she answers absently.

Han shakes his head. “No. Not the world. _Him._ ”

Beneath her hands, his skin is hot and damp to the touch.

“Feverish,” observes Ben—the _other_ Ben, the one who didn’t _kill his father_ , _that’s right, Rey, don’t forget it_ —

“I don’t suppose you can help?” Rey snaps. She doesn’t mean to be harsh, but the secrets are too much for her to carry, as is the knowledge that if Kylo wakes up she will be both very relieved and very afraid for what will happen next.

Ben crouches beside his father. “There’s more you’re not telling us, Supreme Leader.” He jabs a finger. It’s all Han, that gesture.

Rey realizes that her hand is still pressed against Kylo’s chest. Before Ben’s eyes can follow that, she tugs it away and begins to count the bacta patches.

“Yes,” she says, slowly. “As I already said, I didn’t tell you that he was here. I wasn’t sure myself. And I needed your help, and I didn’t know if…if you would help him, if I told you who he was.”

“Why wouldn’t we help _me_?” Ben demands, but he sounds suspicious, which is answer enough in itself.

“He’s not you,” Han says gruffly, and just like that, Kylo opens his eyes.

…

His mind finds Rey’s—not, she thinks, by choice. For once, he’s caught too much off-guard to throw up any kind of barrier. Rey is swept away by _pain_. Kylo is all pain and longing and disappointed glory.

And he isn’t thinking of her.

“Fa—Solo.” He struggles, hand pressed to chest, staunching the flow from shallow, angry wounds, and tries to sit up. “Enough. Leave me.”

“Look here, kid,” Han says. “I know this is a big shock, but—”

Kylo laughs. It’s a guttural, frayed sound. “How many more times? How many more times will you make me do it?”

“He’s hallucinating,” Rey says, leaning into Kylo’s line of vision. “Ben, please.” She is betraying herself utterly here, showing—well, showing that there is much that she’s tried to hide, even from her own heart. “Ben, you’ve been badly hurt. Remember?”

His eyes focus on her, still wild. “Rey, you have to go. I don’t want you to watch.”  

“I’m really here. This isn’t a dream.” She swallows hard. He dreams of killing his father, again and again. That is what this must all be. And he does it laughing, and he does it with pain. To this, he falls, and has fallen.

He is silent. His eyes are dark as the sky behind the stars.

In her mind, she whispers, _let me help you_ , and he answers, _you left me_.

Rey can see the floating sparks, the crackle of flame, the want in his eyes. It is always there if she looks for it. _You asked me for something I could not give._

She expects anger, but he falls back against the bunk. He shuts his eyes, jaw set. She thinks he cannot bear to see his father.

Rey turns pleadingly to Han. She pleads a great deal in this strange world. “Can you give us a little while? I think—I think it might help.”

“I don’t trust him,” Ben says.

Kylo’s eyes open again, but before he can see his mirror image, Han tugs his son’s arm. “Let’s give them a minute.”

When they are gone, Kylo says, “There’s so many voices.”

“You need to be quiet, and—” Just like that, she’s lost again. Because this is _Kylo Ren_ , who swore to kill her only a few day cycles ago.

His voice rises, urgent. “You can’t be here.”

“I am. No time to argue. Would you be quiet? Please?” Maybe a little of his mother’s sharp tongue will keep him in check.

He seems too spent to protest. He has lost a lot of blood; that is what she _should_ be tending to instead of gawking. But all the same his eyes meet hers for too long.

 _Go back to Takodana_. Are they enemies, here? Do they have to be?

Rey does not cry. She begins to clean the lacerations across his ribs, conscious of every brush of fingertip to skin. She wonders why Leia sent her, if Leia knew anything.

If Luke, here, would know.

“She’ll find us,” Kylo murmurs, eyes drifting shut.

“The…” Rey pauses. It’s strangely difficult to say. “The other me?”

“She isn’t you.” He seems particularly decided on _that_.

…

“Looks like you need a drink, Supreme Leader.”

She hates and loves the fact that the Falcon is the same here. That she knows its passageways and quirks like the back of her hand. That she can be tucked away in the same corner she was in _their_ world, the proper world, watching Finn worry over her.

She realizes, belatedly, that Han is speaking to her.

A little Corellian whiskey sent Kylo back to sleep when she was done patching him up. She used five of the seven bacta patches. Han assured her that it was alright, that they’d find plenty more at the next trading post. Now he’s standing in front of her with a flask of the same whiskey.

It’s fairly clear that Han Solo wants to talk.

“Where’s Ben?” Rey asks. She wipes her lips with the back of her hand.

“Planning tomorrow’s flight in the cockpit. Pouting.” He lifts a grizzled eyebrow. “Other one pouts too, I’ll bet.”

 _Try, ‘destroys galaxies’_ , Rey thinks, but what comes out is, “Yes. Sometimes.”

“He has a hard life there?”

“Yes.”

“But he has his mother.”

Rey cannot speak of Leia, who has lost everything, not now. “Leia’s alive.”

Han’s too quick by half. “That’s not what I asked.”

“They’re not close.” Rey says it in a strangled whisper, hoping that she keeps her footing on the blade’s edge. To fall is to watch someone die. She has done that too many times before.

She thanks the stars—whatever stars there are—that Han drops the subject. He hands her the flask. “Keep this with you, if you need it. It’s Ben’s. He’ll get over it.”

It’s far too risky for her to take one of the bunks, given the number of Solos aboard ship, and the secrets they haven’t yet learned. Heavy-footed, she returns to the med-bay, where Kylo is motionless, blank-faced. She had washed the blood away and though bruised, she does not think his face will scar—at least, not any more than it already has.

Rey is used to cramped quarters, to settling her spine against durasteel. This is almost the closest she has ever been to him, without some kind of unbearable tension. Once more, she finds herself wandering in a field of hopes she has no real claim to.

 _I am tired, too,_ she reminds herself. _I am tired, too_.

_Rey…_

_We mustn’t talk, remember? You keep saying she’ll find us._

She twists her neck to get a glimpse of his face, but it reveals nothing. In sleep, he is unreadable as his father, with age and wisdom, can be.

She was too far away to see what his face told on the bridge, what Han saw there.

If Han knew he was about to die, Rey thinks, he would have stayed there all the same.

His thoughts keep trying to twine with hers. Relentless, almost child-like. Children never understand when they have been cast aside or forgotten. Rey knows that better than anyone. It is her weakness; hating what it means to leave; to be left.

She needs sleep. He needs rest. The two will be impossible, if he doesn’t stop this. She takes a leap of faith in this unknown, unsought galaxy and imagines her hand in his.

His onslaught recedes at once. For the first time: calm.

Rey keeps her hand there. She thinks _warmth_ , _comfort_ , _peace_ , and she sleeps.

…

When she wakes, her shoulder aches. She glances down and sees that her arm is raised. Her fingers, linked through Kylo’s, are not imaginary at all.


	8. Chapter 8

_Time was away and she was here_

_And life no longer what it was,_

_The bell was silent in the air_

_And all the room one glow because_

_Time was away and she was here._

_\- Louis MacNeice_

His skin burns where her fingers touched his. He thinks that this is his fault. A brand, searing what had been gentle in the unknown of darkness.

She stares at him with fierce, unfriendly eyes, and hisses, “What are you doing?”  
If she expected a sharp retort, he has nothing to give. Silence must be what happens to men whose ghosts come back to life.

(Did he? Is Han Solo—)

“I mean,” Rey amends, and just like that, he is back on firm ground again, “You startled me.”

He flexes his fingers. He can feel a flush mounting in his cheeks. No doubt she sees it. _Pities_ it. No doubt, too, it is only another fear, brought on by his wounds. He thinks he remembers last night, in aching snatches. Thinks he remembers that it was _her_ to reach out.

Rey rocks to her feet, a little stiff and unsteady. “Listen,” she half-whispers. They seem to be only ones here, in the med-bay of the Falcon. That, at least, is easier to believe than what he saw last night. Rey says, “We need to get back. To our world, I mean.”

“I agree.” If he survives that long. He stands up, bracing himself against the edge of the bunk. His wounds throb, but his head is clearer. In Kylo’s experience, that is not always a good thing.

"I need you to swear that you won't do anything to sabotage me," Rey adds. She stands as she might on sand, seeking balance and battle-stance while everything shifts beneath her. "We're going to have to work together to undo...whatever it is that happened."

"Why would  _I_  sabotage you?" After the softness of his dreams, of her hand in his, _this_ is anger. "You're the one who left me for dead." As soon as he says it aloud, he fears she will turn her back on him forever.

“Please. You aren’t dead,” Rey practically spits. But for just a moment the barrier falls, and he sees what she sees, feels what she feels: blood dancing in their veins, tears gathering in her eyes, _rule with me, Rey_ , all the unspoken fractures that coalesced to mean _don’t leave_ , and that had shattered once more in the space of a moment’s rejection.

Rey says, not quite as coldly as he imagines she must want to, “I’d like it very much if you stopped trying to kill everyone I love back home, too, but I never really get what I want.”

He takes a risk. Takes a risk on last night, on the dreams that don’t belong to him, but that also don’t belong to anyone else. He takes a step towards her, so that they are a matched set of shoulders and hips. “What is that you _want_?”

He watches Rey’s teeth graze her lower lip. The wall is up again. “I want a truce.” She jabs a finger his chest, emboldened. He will always open himself to her touch. She could split him wide-open and it would still be so.

Indeed it _is_ so.

Somewhere amid the torture in this upended world, he lost all real hold of anger and hatred. Kylo Ren has surrendered to the girl of Jakku.

( _But_.)

( _But. He will not tell her yet_.)

Rey’s finger is still poking against his sternum. “I want a truce, which is _not_ , by the way, what you offered me before.”

He closes his hand around her wrist and pulls her near to him, his other arm bracketing her shoulders in warmth and pressure. It is not charm, or trickery, for he has never mastered either of these things. It is _need_. It happens so quickly he does not have time to wonder how, exactly, he dared.

"Glad you two are awake," drawls his own voice, from across the cabin.

Kylo lets go of her and Rey stumbles back. Kylo longs for a weapon in his hand, anything that will stave off the sight of himself, unscarred, propped against the far wall and grinning like a Coruscanti snake-charmer.

Leave it to a Solo, to be smug in the face of danger and warped reality.

He is not a fool: he can combine the variables. In this world, he _is_ the son Han Solo wanted.

Surely it is only right that that stabs, saber-bright, at his heart.

 _Only right._ (If only he had not survived the night.)

 

They follow Ben Solo through the worn corridors of the Falcon, until they reach the cockpit. The entirety of Kylo’s soul and history lodges itself inconveniently in his throat.

“Hey, kid,” Han Solo says, turning in the pilot’s chair. His voice is too bright and therefore too brittle. Perhaps in this world, this is not how father speaks to son, but Kylo knows that edge of doubt well. “Want something to eat?”

“Hold up, Dad. Don’t feed him until we know the truth.”

There is a scowl on the other Ben Solo’s face that is vexingly familiar. He’s felt it on his own face many times, though the scar pulls it askew now.

He didn’t even like himself when there was only one of him.

Chewie, who looks exactly the same as he always has—and exactly the same as he looked when he buried a blaster bolt in Kylo’s side, the last time they met—growls a garble of agreement with Ben.  

Rey intervenes. The Falcon is ready for take-off, but Kylo assumes that they won’t go anywhere until he is more of a known entity. “We all need to eat, don’t we? Questions over some breakfast?”

She’s postponing the inevitable, Kylo knows. He risks another brief glance at Han Solo’s face and feels like he's taken a dive from a cliff-face—or a bridge.

 

Breakfast is a meager affair. For all their suspicions, the Solos are generous, even if the food is like ashes on the tongue.

“How are your wounds?” Rey asks, in an undertone. She keeps curling and uncurling her fingers against the palm of her hand. Regretting, he is certain, her gesture of the night before.

He shrugs. The hazy glow of fever is gone. The sting and pulse of torn flesh still taunts him, but he can admit when he's been mended.

 

_Did you do this?_

_Do what?_

He cannot quite say, _Heal me_.

 

“We’ve been sent over here to solve something,” Rey explains, to the joint skepticism of father and son. “Me and...Ben.”

_Ben?_

_Want me to tell them your other name, Supreme Leader?_

He subsides into sullen mental silence, but to the room he says, “Any idea how we can get back to our world?”

He has rebels to hunt down, after all. Let this Han Solo unwittingly help him with _that_.

He finds that spite is unexpectedly difficult to sustain.

The other Ben Solo narrows his eyes at him, but Han rises to the bait.

“Luke,” Han announces. “Before you showed up, more dead than alive, we were going to take Rey to him.” He lifts a brow. “She insisted we wait. Guess she wanted to save someone.”

Rey is staring at the last crumbs of her rations.

Kylo feels something halfway between warmth and ache take root between his ribs. He reaches for her mind with his, because he will always be more desperate than he wants to be, but the barrier is up.

Then he registers the whole of what his fath—Han said.

Even here, he can’t escape Luke Skywalker's legacy.

“Where is he?” Kylo asks, but Rey shakes her head.

“They won’t say. Force ears everywhere.” Rey taps her own. Kylo swallows down the urge to find the gesture—endearing? That doesn’t seem like a word that can belong to him. “But that’s still where we’re headed, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. She’s ready to go.” Han taps the wall, palm flat, affectionate, like the Falcon is a living thing. Kylo grinds his teeth hard enough that it hurts, hard enough that he thinks of the flatness of Not-Rey’s eyes, steely and absolute.

She may still be watching him.

The surge that rushes through him is one of urgency: they must leave, and find his uncle, find Luke of the ageless eyes and the young optimism, Luke who will know what to do.

The next moment, he reels against the shock. That Luke, in all worlds, is gone.

And any hope or optimism that was left in Luke Skywalker was ground out of him by the nephew whose soul, since birth, was wreathed in shadows.

 

When he sees Han Solo’s hands settle on the controls—

_Don’t look down, kid. Look ahead._

_Why would I look down?_

_You tell me. I see that mind of yours, spinning wheels. You’ll get bogged down in the buttons and gears. They’re not the point._

_I know that._

_Good._

His flight skills in the First Order have always been unmatched. No one has the daring of Ren, no one marries the same hotblooded risks with the same cold calculus.

No one, in short, knows quite so well how to _look ahead_.

He knows Rey is watching him, and the other Ben Solo is doubting him, and Chewie is planning how to throttle him with one hairy hand.

And all he wants is for Han Solo to look at _him_.

(He looks down.)

 

But as it is, the Falcon never leaves the ground.

 

As it is—or as it _was_ , for such recalibrations of destiny can never be catalogued as memory in the moment in which they pass—the planet shakes. Rey loses her balance, or Kylo thinks she does, and he catches her elbow in his palm. And somehow in the chaos, he’s conscious first and foremost of that point of contact.

“Kriffing…” Han’s voice trails away.

“What is it?”

Kylo isn’t even sure who asks it. But ahead, they can all see it—a rising, translucent wall climbing skyward. It shimmers like an oil-slick.

 

_Did you really think this was over?_

The bond should be only his and Rey’s—the _real_ Rey’s. It must be his own weakness, the indent of mental lesions left by Snoke, that _she_ , not-Rey, can enter so easily.

He doesn’t know what the right thing to do is; it’s been so long since he cared. But even so—even though he has killed the man who is before him, even though he broke the mind and body of himself, even though he cannot make the girl with the wide-open heart trust him, he does not…

He does not want them to die at the hands of anybody else.

Perhaps that is a start. Or, looking at the sky that traps them in, perhaps it is an end.

 

“You were a fool to think she’d let you go so easily,” Ben Solo snaps.

“Because she’s never let go of _you_?” Kylo shoots back. He’s always been good at striking the sharpest blows at himself. He realizes a second too late that admitting this, in any universe’s version of himself and, well, Rey, is—

It’s too late. That’s the point.

“Be quiet, both of you,” Han growls. Less brittle, more familiar. _Dad_. Kylo pushes away the word as if it is a fresh blade taken to the path carved across his cheek.

They’ve left the Falcon behind for now. It draws too much attention; it always has. Apparently _that_ doesn’t change, even if everything else does. In single file, Han leading, then Ben, then Rey, then Kylo, then Chewie, who is breathing murderously, they sneak through the shrubby underbrush that tangles its way away from Hosnian Prime’s outskirts.

Kylo doesn’t believe that they really have a plan. He stares at the curls clinging, sweat-damp, to the back of Rey’s neck. Struggles, again, to decide what even matters.

_Keeping her safe, laser-brain._

That’s his mot—Leia’s voice. Leia isn’t even here. She’s dead, in this world. And she’d only ever called Han that, not Ben. Nobody ever questioned Ben’s intelligence, just what he would do with it.

 

_Are you alright?_

_I’m fine. This is her, isn’t it? The other me?_

_Seems so._

_She wants you back?_

_I don’t know._ They’ve shifted out of hostility again to tentative alliance. Maybe it’s the prickly branches slapping them at every turn; no need for lightsabers (even if Rey has the broken halves of his grandfather’s in her satchel, which Kylo knows she does). Kylo feels warm, then wonders if he’s feverish again. _Then_ wonders, frantically, if he’s guarded himself from Rey’s thoughts before returning to his own introspection.

 _Fool_ , he reminds himself. _There’s more to guard against than her, here_.

 

With the city a rising blur of black and gray in the distance, they huddle together in the half-light. The shield looms, impenetrable, on every side. Kylo can feel its Force signature crackling along his skin. It feels like a twisted version of Rey’s, which, he supposes, it is.

“We’re not getting to Luke without _her_ say-so,” Han says, arms folded over his chest. “Any ideas, Supreme Leader?”

It takes half a second for Kylo to remember that in this world, that means Rey.

Rey chews her lip. “She’s already caught—Ben,” she says. “And let him go. I think she must have…she must have presumed that he’d find me.”

“And why would she presume that?” the other Ben Solo demands, eyes glinting.

Even if he wanted to, it would be dangerous to say, _because she found the desire inside me, because in a half-conscious state I reached for Rey_. It’s easier to decide, of course, that he will disclose nothing on principle. Kylo folds his arm as well. This shifts his bruises uncomfortably, and makes him look like Han. He thinks about this only afterwards.

“Tight-lipped,” his alternate version observes. “Quite the bond between you two. Not suspicious at all that you found each other.”

“Oh, come off it,” Rey says, and slaps him on the arm. Slaps _him_ , the _other_ one, just as casually as if there was something between _them_. “A little guilt, hmm? The point is, we’re stuck here. No Luke, as Han said. And Ben and I need to get back home.”

“There’s trouble there?” Han’s brow furrows.

Rey’s eyes drop. It’s just a second, but everyone sees it.

Chewie announces that he thinks they’re all hiding something.

“There _is_ trouble,” Rey says. “The Rebel alliances are under attack. The Jedi need to be rebuilt.”

Kylo would have bet his lightsaber, which he no longer has, that _he’d_ be the one to scoff at that, but his doppelganger does first.

“Still on that Jedi kick, Rey?”

“Always,” she says, with a jaw set like steel.

“Well, then,” Han says. “We need to…” His eyes flicker to his son. The right son. Not the one who killed him. “We need to neutralize her.” He roughs up his hair with one hand. “Short of getting to Skywalker, I can’t see a second way out of this for you two.” He pauses. “Or for any of us.”

“What do you mean?” Rey asks. Her chin tilts forward. Kylo recognizes that eagerness. It means she wants to hear the answer that will follow.

“I mean you’re right, Supreme Leader.” Han’s clear-eyed, steady-voiced, even if his beloved Ben is staring his hands with a cloud of darkness on his brow.

 _That_ , Kylo thinks, _is how it begins_.

Later in life, this time.

“I’m right?” Rey clasps her hands together. “You’re going to join the rebels?”

“I’ve always been a rebel,” Han tells her, unable to keep a smirk from leavening his gravity. “But running isn’t the way forward. She’s trapped us here. It’s…head-on, or not at all.”

_Come home._

(In another world, Han Solo left a life of running to take the world head-on, too. He asked for the face of his son—and maybe he even received it.)

 

If the ground shifted as they tried to leave it, this new direction has shifted something less tangible. Kylo sees himself mirrored more than ever in Ben Solo’s brooding, and when he tries to piece the reasons for it together he can only come up with an answer that should not give him as much hope as it does:

 _Rey_.

It seems that Not-Ben Solo loves Not-Rey…

_Loves?_

It plummets through him, force and Force, and he retracts his heart into the most careful stillness he can find.


	9. Chapter 9

_you_

_who fly with them_

_._

_you who are neither_

_before nor after_

_you who arrive_

_\- W.S. Merwin_

“I hate to say it.” Rey grimaces. “But I think we have been a pack of idiots.”

Three Solo faces, with identical expressions of indignation, wheel on her.

“Bantha-brains, if you prefer. And I count myself as one of them!” Rey stretches out a hand. “But let's not pretend we can’t all see it!”

Kylo speaks, surprising her.  “It’s not just a sky shield. It’s a dome. Trapped by land and air.”

“We already guessed as much,” Ben says sourly. He and Kylo glare daggers at each other whenever they look in the same direction. “Isn’t it worth it to see what we’re up against?”

It is, at best, a loaded choice of words. The shimmering shield, translucent but powerful enough, Rey is sure, to crumple the Falcon like scrap metal, is a mere extension of—

 _Her_. _Here_. A Rey plucked from her graveyard desert, hardened into something capable of destroying more than ships.

Han, so far, has said nothing. His sharp eyes dart between the twin halves of his son. Perhaps there is enough in that sight to cast doubt along the path of every option. He murmurs something to Chewbacca, who mumbles a reply.

Han says, “We’re halfway between city and shield now. Between two dead-ends, if you ask me.” He jerks his chin skyward. “Night is coming on anyway. Thinking and sleeping can’t do much harm at this point.”

Rey feels Kylo's anger rise and then recede.

There are no trees. Instead, there are broad stumps concealed by the tangle of brush, easy enough to trip over. 

The trees have been cut down, Rey realizes, and the ground burned. Brush is all that will grow here.  
Takodana flares emerald bright in her memory, and she doesn’t fight the image away before Kylo's eyes, wide with surprise or hope or any of those unspeakable things, has captured hers.

( _She_ had taken his hand, hadn’t she? It had been _her_.)

They hack a circle in the brush and lay down their packs. Nobody mentions starting a fire, but they huddle around some invisible point anyway.

 _Misery_. Rey reads misery, and tries to sneak a glance at Kylo's face.

_You don’t think this is your fault, do you?_

_What part?_

_The…other me. Stopping us._

She can feel him, moody as a rising storm, about to smother the connection with his silence. Rey reaches across the tense, invisible strand, and prods, hard.

_Don’t do that._

_Do what?_ Ah. There it is. A touch of petulance.

Ben Solo was a child once. Raised by Han and Leia, taking the flash and fire of them both, swallowing it like a rain of hail or bullets. Why couldn’t he have their humor?

The other Ben Solo seems to have managed well enough.

 _I know you’re angry with me._ She’s decided to face it head-on. _And I know you’re angry with yourself. Can’t you choose one?_

_I tried to._

Blood rises in Rey’s cheeks, but she keeps going. _You wanted to save me. When you were fleeing from her. You told me I had to get away. You told me she was trying to find me._

 _Yes?_ It is bitten-off and bitter. A child, Rey reminds herself. He was a child once. _What of it?_

_You weren’t angry at me then._

He raises his head and looks at her across the tight circle of their camp. Chewbacca is a hulking mass of hair and twigs between them. She sees Kylo’s fingers, pale and bruised at the knuckles, crook and tighten.

Inside her mind, he says nothing. He doesn’t have to, looking at her like that.

 

Is it useful, anymore?

Pretending that there isn’t something between them?

She’s known the other Ben Solo for a couple of day cycles, no more, and already, he could tell.

They were sent here for a reason.

Maybe the reason is one they already knew.

 

(You can’t love things, on Jakku. You can only remember. But Rey is stubborn, both in remembering, which she is permitted, and loving, which she is not. Rey crafts a doll out of scraps, and a hope out of embers. Rey digs deep in the scarred sands, for the metal flesh of slumbering ship-beasts, which keeps her alive.)

 

His gaze is her gaze, and neither will let it go.

Is she a traitor? Leia hadn’t thought so. Takodana had welcomed her with open green, then plunged her into another world, but it had not, exactly, _rebuked_ her.

Rey tries for the impossible.

She smiles at him.

 

(Here is a secret that nobody will tell you: everyone is a traitor, in one way or another.)

(Here is a secret that everyone already knows: there are some steps, some paths, from which you cannot turn back.)

 

In full view of his father, Chewbacca, and, curiously enough, his other self, Kylo stands and stalks over to Rey. He stretches out a hand as if he would seize her arm, but at the last second—he doesn’t.

(Touch is always too much the fatal step.)

Rey is quick to respond anyway; she is on her feet. To Han, she says, “We’ll be back.” Challenges him, with her eyes, to accuse her of being a schemer or double-dealer.

He doesn’t.

He is Kylo’s father, after all. Rey knows he isn’t blind.

Out of earshot, Kylo hunches his shoulders but still towers amongst the scrubby brush. When he speaks aloud, his voice is a rasp, as though he speaks through pain. “What are you playing at?”

Rey wipes any trace of the smile from her face, folds her arms over her chest. It’s a motion his eyes follow, almost against his will. “I’m not _playing_ at anything, you lug-nut.”

“ _Lug-nut_?”

“There. Got your attention, didn’t I?” She’s snapping now. “We’ve been sent here, Ben.”

He opens his soft-lipped mouth, likely to tell her not to call him by the name his family gave him, but then he thinks better of it.

“I know,” he says.

“So what are we to make of it?” Rey is treading carefully, one foot in front of other. A path, a bridge—it matters not. She has to walk it. “You and I, sent to a world where…”

 _Where we are what the other hopes_.

Kylo leans forward, bowed over her. If he ever embraced her, he would swallow her up. Rey cannot think of that. “I never asked that of you,” he says. “To be like her.”

Rey’s jaw clenches. “Then what,” she replies, “Did you think you were asking?”

 

This world is so empty of color. In Jakku, the air changed more than the shades of the sky. A sandstorm could rise up on a clear day. You had to recognize the scent of danger, more than its face.

Here, too, the shield above them darkens the sky but does not flood it with any life, any warmth or coldness. Rey wonders how pale her face must look to him, how sickly, even.

“I don’t know,” she says quickly, a feint with a blade rather than an answer to his last words, “If any of this is real.”

She half-expects a sharp retort, _of course it isn’t, how could you not see_ , but instead a muscle in his cheek jumps and twitches.

Of course.

Of course, in the depths of a tortured, pointed soul, Ben Solo wants the world where his father lives to be real.

 

“Maybe we should go back to camp,” she says. Night falls as a stone falls; heavy and swift.

Kylo shakes his head. And then, surprising her again, he sinks to the ground, cross-legged, elbows on his knees. The brush looms around him like a throng of spiny, inquisitive creatures. He tips his head forward so that hair slants across his face.

Rey sits opposite him. Their knees are almost touching.

“I’ve gone mad, haven’t I?” His voice has taken on that feverish edge again. “None of this real. Not her. Not him. Not _you_.”

Perhaps Rey shouldn’t have the confidence she does. Perhaps she has lost her grip on the truth, too. Perhaps her body lies broken in Takodana, and this is all an after-life dream.

“I am real,” she says, nonetheless. “I wouldn’t lie.” A breath. “Not to you.”

She rests a hand on his knee.

He takes it.

He takes it, and somehow, in that moment, both her hands fall into his, and he raises them to his lips. She feels the desperate heat of his mouth flame across them as he kisses her palms.

Rey stays perfectly still, fire coursing over every inch of her skin.

 

The world, _their_ world, would tell her not to feel sorry for him. Not to forgive him for his sins against others, or against herself. Their world would tell her that he cannot be saved.

Neither Han nor Leia nor Luke believed this.

And who is Rey, if she does not believe in _them_?

(In him.)

 

All the same—

“I can’t be who you want me to be,” Rey whispers softly. He lifts his head, the edges of his hair ghosting over her fingertips. If Rey allows herself to do what she longs to, to cradle his face in her hands, he will come for her lips next.

There is no going back from that; both of them would be utterly lost.

“I know,” he says. She has never heard him speak without falling, without raising his eyes and dropping his heart. She hates to think that the gentleness of him, the recklessness, was all laid bare for the mighty darkness, so many years ago.

And even now.

(He doesn’t let go of her hands.)

 

Rey smiles again. He does not return it. She did not expect him to. “We will find our way back,” she says. And still smiling, though her heart is in her throat, she adds, “And if you insist on continuing to hurt my friends, I will put an end to the entire First Order.”

“I know,” he repeats. No smile, still, but there is the smallest flicker of warmth in the darkling depths of those endless eyes.

_Can’t you be who I want you to be?_

She almost says it.

But she is here too. She was sent here too. She must be wrong about something.

Rey knows that, maybe even knows what it is she is wrong about, but she doesn’t have every word for it yet.

 

Somewhere between fearing him and knowing him, between picking up a lightsaber and splitting it in two, she changed.

 

When they return to camp, at the same careful, charged distance they always maintain, Han’s face says volumes but he makes no comment. The other Ben Solo is wrapped in a spare cloak, eyes shuttered closed. If he dreams of the girl with Rey’s face, none of them can tell.

“Do we have a plan?” Rey asks, looping her arms around her knees. Her hands are still trembling with the memory of Kylo’s lips. “She seems to want us to face her head-on. What does she _want_?”

“Ben,” Han says simply.

Kylo, not looking at him, asks only, “Why?”

Han gapes a bit, almost as if it to say, _don’t you know?_ He answers, “They had a...connection once. Ben’s too much of an optimist. Thought he could save her.”

Rey is not looking at Kylo, and Kylo is certainly not looking at Rey.

Chewie sighs explosively, and Han nods. “That’s right. No way to see what goes on in that head of hers.” To Rey and Kylo, he adds, “Even Ben never understood her so well as he thought he did.”

Rey feel the connection of the bond pinch, as if Kylo is holding it shut with everything he has.

She wonders what he doesn’t want her to see, in that head of his.

 

There is, of course, one person who can understand the mind of Rey.

 

Rey grazes her chin with her knuckles, an old habit from Jakku. When you live all alone, for so long, you run your hands along your own skin, sometimes, just to make certain that you are still there.

When you live all alone, you know yourself inside and out, because nobody else will.

 

Whatever Not-Rey desires from Not-Ben, she isn’t trying to trap _him_.

(Her eyes are on herself.)

 

Say what you will of destiny, of the ways of the Force and the ways the Force never answers its own questions. All things are new with each turning of time. All things are new, and nothing is.

 

Kylo is a light sleeper. Rey has been pulled into his restless dreams and late-night wakefulness often enough to learn this. She watches him from under her half-shut lids and waits for his chin to dip towards his chest.

(He won’t stretch out to his full length here, won’t even lie down. Not in the presence of the man he killed, the father he destroyed. He sits, hunched forward, always ready for a fight that does not come as often as Rey believes he wants it to.)

What she does next feels almost more like a betrayal than any of the moments in which he cursed her as a traitor (if he ever did). Rey leans gently into the bond, and finds it open, trusting. Finds, in fact, the warmth of her own rough-calloused hands, held close and comforting in his mind.

Rey reminds herself to be calm.

Then she sends an image of her own; her, curled up beside him, pressing against his shoulder, slipping her hands around his arm to cling, to stay.

Then she leaves him.


	10. Chapter 10

_I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do._

_A box made out of leaves._

_What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless._

_Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else._

_I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon._

_From the landscape: a sense of scale._

_From the dead: a sense of scale._

_I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority._

_Everything casts a shadow._

_Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything._

_\- Richard Siken_

He wakes, wanting her.

His arms are empty.

 

What follows is a flurry of blame. Kylo finds himself, boot to boot with… _himself_ , a frisson of rage crackling between them. He hates the man with his face and without his wounds. Hates that there could be other wounds, other healings, other endings.

Han Solo pulls them apart. It’s the first time (at least in a conscious state) that the man who looks like his father has touched him.

And the man feels like his father, too. The same iron grip and swift force, then a pat on his shoulder. Both their shoulders.

“She’s gone, as we’ve all noticed,” Han acknowledges wryly. “Did either of you two identical metal-mouths stop to consider _where_ she might be?”

“Rey’s the one she wants,” Kylo answers at last. The words are devastating, when said aloud.

If Han is tempted to decry Rey’s risk-taking, he doesn’t show it. He looks at his son and then at Kylo. “Well?”

They don’t even discuss any other prospect than following her.

 

 _What were you thinking?_  he hurls against the bond, but the silence that greets him is obsidian and absolute.

Perhaps this is what he deserves.

It isn't what  _she_ deserves, though, and that is all that matters now.

If he hadn't chosen the girl instead of the droid, destiny instead of the clearest path to his mission, Han Solo might never have come to Starkiller Base.

This doesn't make him angry at Rey, only at himself, and at Snoke, who spent years threading his itching poison through all the flesh and blood and shame that was Ben Solo.

He is side-by-side now with the Ben that Rey must have seen in her vision, clad in lighter garments, loving his father as a son should, loved by his father as a son should be.

(He remembers the giving face of Han Solo on the bridge, eyes never leaving his until they went blank.)

(Until they had to.)

 

Wrapped in nondescript cloaks bought from a sleepy-eyed trader with four heads, they scale the streets of the capital city. After a stretch of time, Kylo realizes that he is leading, not because he knows the streets better than they do, but because he is force-sensitive. He'll be the one to sense Rey—both Reys. If, of course, they can be sensed at all.

 

He doesn’t want her anymore, the Rey in his vision. He doesn’t want her to be cold, to be ground down into the shards the darkness demands of all its servants.

He only ever wanted her to be with him.

It had seemed so simple at the time, when everything was on fire and his enemy lay slain. It had seemed simple, because desire often does.

(Truth rarely is.)

 

“Why would she do this?”

So, there’s a truce. A truce between his two selves. Kylo looks at his own face, unscarred, a little less pale. He thinks he doesn’t know his own eyes. He wonders if this Ben Solo has ever been scraped raw by anger, or by fear.

“Which one?”

“Yours.”

The word licks like a flame. It warms him.

 ”She’s probably trying to save us,” Kylo mutters.

Behind him, the man who looks and feels and  _is_  exactly like his father stifles a cough.

 

In their world, Chewbacca blasted him in the side. Here, the Wookiee seems to have grudgingly accepted him as a less-favorable shade of the golden son. In their world, Han Solo is gone, and Luke is gone, and Leia is going—in this world, Han Solo lives. In their world, Hux may well be searching for a body among rubble, hoping to finish it off.

And yet that’s the world he wants to go back to.

 

The bond reopens with a snap.

He feels Rey’s pain first. He's always found it easiest to register pain.

Motioning to the family that will never be his family, he cuts a sharp left.

 

The citadel rises above the charcoal-block senator's mansions, a sharp edifice like a raised finger against the hollow of the sky-shield. Kylo has seen every manner of architecture in the process of scoring the galaxy with war and order. There is something in the lines of this surviving spire that is more than layers of metal and stone.

Some lands, like some people, become a product of what inhabits them.

“They're in there,” he says.

“Of course they are,” Ben snipes. “It's the Order’s stronghold.”

Kylo ignores him. “They're—” fear hatchets through him. A sudden image of Rey— _his_  Rey—plummeting from the tower's summit flashes across his mind. “We have to hurry,” he says, like they haven't been hurrying. He half-expects Ben to chide him for that, but the Solo men are silent, quickening an already hasty pace. Chewbacca whines deep in his throat.

 

He found an answer to the question  _why_  somehow, but now it won't leave him alone. What is Rey—the Rey of yesterday, whose calloused hands he worshipped with kisses, whose heart he has broken (and for which he has broken himself)—trying to accomplish? Does she think that her death in this alteration of time and history will make a difference?

What if she leaves him here alone?

She'd told him, stone-cold-certain, that none of this was real. None of it. Not his father, or the very ground they stand upon.

 

Even once they have managed to slip between the empty gardens Kylo first encountered and have crept along streets that run even-paved and upwards, they are faced with a profound and age-old problem:

Guards.

There are a dozen or so, by Kylo’s count. Stormtroopers. They’re familiar, but not in a way that comforts him. He supposes it’s his own fault; he has crafted a life and legacy that does not allow for comfort.

“Plan?” he whispers, through clenched teeth.

“We’re not going to be able to shoot our way through,” Han muses, like that was ever really an option. Kylo feels a surge of annoyance, undercut by something bone-deep that might be affection—

And that  _is_  familiar, like a thumb brushed down the line of his cheek.

Ben shuffles his feet. Kylo can recognize his own equivocation.

“Well? You have something?”

“Jatoori gas,” Ben admits, showing a small tube in the palm of his hand. “One problem.”

“Which is?”

“She’ll know it’s me.”

Kylo stares Ben in the eyes, and sees a little of himself there at last. The uncertainty. The wakefulness. The great unanswerable question of the future. “She already does.”

 

Through a coughing cloud that stings his eyes, even behind a tightly bound scarf—

Voices.

 _I don’t have anything to give you._  That’s Rey.  _You already know as much as I do._

 _You have him._ The words cut like a knife, and Kylo recognizes her colder counterpart.  _I want to know how._

 _I don’t have him._  Rey sounds frustrated.  _He wouldn’t give up what you have. Power._

 _He doesn’t have power. He_ is _power._  A heartbeat’s pause.  _He just doesn’t know it yet._

 _And I am power too!_  Rey’s temper flares.  _You, me. This is all some sort of dream, I know it._

 _Then it shouldn’t matter_ , spits her mirrored self,  _if I kill you._

Kylo runs.

There are more troopers swarming through the halls. The four of them squeeze into a lift, with Han raining a hail of blaster-fire for cover, and they rocket to the thirty-seventh level. It’s the one where Rey’s Force Signature is flickering with every labored breath she draws in.

 

The sight he takes in as the lift doors launch open is one that Kylo will never forget, if only for how much it reminds him of the last time he turned from the path that darkness had laid before his feet.

Rey, suspended, choking for air. And talking, somehow, through it, because Rey is a fighter.

“ _You can’t kill me_ ,” she gasps. “ _It will kill you, too_.”

The Supreme Leader with the girl’s lips and a creature’s eyes sees both halves of Ben Solo poised to strike. She slams them back against the curving glass wall with a flick of her wrist.

Kylo, in a fractured moment of pain, imagines that he sees his grandfather, standing in her place.

The same power and emptiness.

Maybe it isn’t a bloodline.

Maybe it just all comes down to blood.

 

“They’re both here for you,” she hisses at Rey. “So much Skywalker at your fingertips, and yet you still offered yourself up for slaughter.” Her voice softens a little towards the end, as if she’s more fascinated than angry. Out of the corner of his eye, Kylo sees Ben gingerly picking himself back up. He knows that Han and Chewie wait outside—though likely not outside  _her_  force sense—ready to fend off any troopers who might come to reinforce their leader.

Rey rubs her neck with her fingertips. When she speaks, her voice is hoarse, but it echoes through the room. “None of this is real.”

The room shakes and Kylo fancies himself amid the ruins of Takodana for a moment, but only for a moment. Glass falls from the walls and ceiling and angles itself into sentient spears, canted from a thousand angles but pointing only at one: Rey.

“If you kill me,” Rey says again, as calmly and steadily as if she is reciting a verse, or speaking of the weather, or calling out coordinates for her beloved Falcon, “You will die too.”

 _True?_ Kylo flutters through the bond, and whisper-soft, she answers:

_No idea. Just working with what I’ve got._

He exchanges a glance with Ben.

He isn’t expecting Ben to pluck one of the suspended glass shards from the air and hold it to his neck.

The room is chorused by the sound of breaking.

“What are you doing?” Rey-not-Rey demands, attention utterly diverted. She strides forward and snatches for the glass. If she uses the Force, it will hurt him.

Ben steps back, out of her reach.

“This is over,” he says. “You wanted it to be.”

“I didn’t.”

It seems right, somehow, that the twisted versions of themselves seem suddenly alone in the room. Kylo shoots a glance at Rey, but she’s watching the agonizing act of the ask, mesmerized.

“I wanted you to rule with me,” the empress cries out, and it could have been ripped from Kylo’s throat. It  _had_ been, not so long ago. “ _Why wasn’t that enough?_ ”

A rivulet of deep red trickles down Ben Solo’s collar. It’s seeping between his fingers, too; he is holding on too tightly.

 _I am holding on too tightly_ , Kylo thinks.

 _Right._  She’s in his mind, the same warm understanding of last night, before she ran into danger to prove a point to him.

To prove  _this_ point to him.

_Ben. You have to let go._

 

He has memories that aren’t his memories. Dreams that aren’t his dreams. This Ben, clean and unwounded, slipping from shadow to shadow to love a girl who held the darkest of them all. They’d met in this world when she captured him as a thief; he had sweet-talked her into kisses, into promises that, even with Snoke gone and the world beneath her, she could not bring herself to keep.

She is so unhappy. The other Ben knows this, and now, Kylo does, too.

There is no peace in the Dark Side.

There is precious little peace in the Light.

 

 _None of this is real._  He blinks away the memories, and for a moment, he blinks green. Green and living things, his mother’s voice, his own anger.

 _Takodana_.

 

“Come with me,” Ben Solo is saying, and the glass falls from his hand but his blood keeps falling too. “Come with me, Rey. Let go.”

She has one hand on his shoulder, holding him at arms-length as easily as she might draw him close. Her other hand is on the ruby at her breast.

 _Her heart_ , Kylo thinks.

Rey—his Rey—keeps watching.

 

This world’s Rey lets go.

So does everything else.

Softly, at first, as stone can never be—and then with all the wild rumble of a reckoning. Kylo feels a calloused hand close around his.

“Run!”

They do. They run beyond the reach of the glass walls, shivering into splinters; beyond the crush of weighty stone. They reach the edge of the room, and edge is a window. Rey’s soft boots teeter on the brink. “Let’s go,” she says.

“What?” Kylo shouts, above the din. “Jump?”

The city is beneath them. It is too far to survive.

“Yes,” Rey says. And all of a passing dream— _his_ dream, _his_ memory—her face is golden, as if the room around them is on fire. “Jump.”

 

He stopped telling his mother about his nightmares just after his twelfth birthday. She couldn’t send them away, and the voice in his ear told him that she didn’t want to. That this was how they would keep him close and afraid, a boy who couldn’t sleep alone, couldn’t live alone.

 

(He wonders if he’ll feel his legs break first, if it will be a gradual pain after a sharp impact, or if he will be dead at once.)

 

( _He isn’t dead at all_.)

 

The sky overhead is without the threatening sheen of a force-field-shield. It is not, however, without color. It swells blue-green, the soft and vibrant hue of an atmosphere supporting life.

Kylo breathes. His lungs ache, as they do after a hyperspace jump, but he is otherwise whole. Even the residual aches and pains from his stint in Supreme Leader Rey’s dungeons are wholly absent.

 _Rey_.

He sits up, head-spinning. He is in a meadow. The grass is springy and deep, each dry green blade the width of his thumb.

The meadow rolls out on every side, with no distant demarcation of tree or mountain. If this is a planet—if he didn’t die in a shattered heap amid the senatorial complex of Hosnian Prime—it is not one Kylo knows.

Rey is nowhere to be seen. He rises; he regains balance with only a slight tremor in his knees.

In the distance, two figures.

Two figures he knows.

 

“Been a while since we’ve seen you, kid,” says Han Solo.

 

“I…” Kylo has nothing to say. Nothing to say to his father, now that he is here again, just as there was nothing to be done after he was gone.

“Thought we’d lost you and the other  _her_ ,” Han is saying, while Chewie roars a greeting. “During the earthquake back on Prime.”

“The…earthquake?”

“Oh, my boy got out.” Han waves a hand, like Kylo has asked, like Kylo would want to know of the fate of his other self. “His Supreme Leader saved his life with a few Force tricks. They’re on Canto Bight now, making the locals pay their dues to the Reform.”

“The Reform?” If he wasn’t anxious about her wellbeing, Kylo might almost be glad that Rey isn’t here to hear him sounding like a fool.

“Hosnian Prime all but split in two,” Han explains patiently. “But they’re rebuilding. They’re all rebuilding.” His eyes are crinkling at the corners.

He’s glad. Glad to see this twisted shadow of his true son.

( _None of this is real_.)

“You all escaped?”

“Yes, after she dropped her fancy shield. The city evacuated and we hightailed it out of there before her troopers could realize that their leader had turned.” He scrapes a hand through his hair, which is just as tousled and wild as it ever is. It has gone fully white now, Kylo sees. Time has passed them by again, if time is even something that exists in this borderless, unreal world.

“Where are we now?”

“What? Oh. Little farming planet I wouldn’t have thought you’d know.” Han tips his chin down, considering. “Where’s Rey? Not the former Supreme Leader Rey, mind you.  _Your_ Rey. We’ve always been worried for you.”

_Always._

“How long ago…” Kylo doesn’t bother finishing the question. He’d have guessed that the Force flung him into the stars, some place for further reflection, and maybe the Force did. But he needs her, he knows. He needs Rey to set him right, to tell him when to keep pushing, when to hold himself above the mire of internal anguish, when to smile, when to love.

“He does seem a bit out of it,” Han muses, in response to a comment from Chewie to that effect. “Kid, you sure you’re alright? You were just standing here stock-still when we first saw you. And you say you don’t even know where you are?”

“Ben!” Rey’s voice, breathless.  _Happy_. “Oh, stars. Ben, you’re alright!”

She is running through the grass, jerking her ankles free from its snake-like strands. She is smiling, and it can, in this moment, only be at him.

Chewie rumbles something and Han slaps him on his furry shoulder and laughs. Kylo doesn’t hear what they say, because he does not know where he is, but he knows where Rey is, and that is here.

Here, with her arms around him and her heart beating against his.


	11. Chapter 11

_We were never perfect._

_Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was_

_once a star and made the same mistakes as humans._

_We might make them again, she said._

_Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end._

_You must make your own map._

_\- Joy Harjo_

 

Rey clings to him and he is steady.

(Rey opened her eyes in a quiet, reed-woven world, and only thought of him.)

For her, he jumped. For her, he threw himself into danger, and once again, he took her hand.

This is a life that begins or ends differently, such that it is pierced and centered by the moment she flings herself into his arms.

“ _Rey_ ,” he breathes, against her hair. He says her name the way he has always said it, like it is something that will save him.

His hands are a comforting weight against her spine. Her chin is tucked in the divot between his neck and shoulder. They fit together. The galaxy led them both to Jakku, to Takodana, to a planet that no longer exists, because this has always been true.

 

It is only because Rey remembers, very belatedly, that Han Solo— _his father_ —is standing a few steps away from their embrace, waiting with uncharacteristic patience. When Rey lets go, she doesn’t let go of his hands. In the corners of her vision, Takodana flares verdant, watchful, _near_.

“Glad you two have patched up whatever was rusted,” Han observes. There’s a smile creeping over his face. “Yeah, yeah, Chewie. I hear you. I know they have to go.”

Rey’s hand is suddenly empty.

(He let go.)

“What is it, kid?” Han’s voice is as gentle as Rey’s ever heard it. “You have a world to get to. Hell, I’m not force-sensitive, and I can _feel_ it. You’re ready. Ready to do whatever it is you’re supposed to do.” He pauses. Again, again. Han Solo has grown old. “I died there, sure, but—"

There is a silence in the meadow, and it bites its way amid the grass around their feet. It is a silence that sounds almost like a voice, like a voice that began in a young boy’s nightmares.

“You didn’t die,” his son says, at last, from the other side of time. “It was me. I killed you.”

For a second that clenches like a fist, no one says anything. Rey can only think of the two Ben Solos, both of whom have had to grapple with the shadow cast by their father’s light. Her Ben—she doesn’t quite want to call him Kylo anymore, but she must identify him somehow, and why not as hers?—has tears that hang in his eyes like stars.

Han doesn’t move. When he speaks, he only says—

“I know.”

It is his most famous catchphrase, a story that even Rey has heard, because everyone has heard it. The love story sung around the galaxy— _their galaxy_ ,  _every galaxy_ —is marked with near escapes and harsh words and soft kisses, and the man who knows is always marked by a final fall.

Ben (her Ben) chokes. “What?”

“I know,” Han repeats. “Knew since you first showed up here, not able to look me in the eyes. I’m simple, kid. Not stupid.”

Then he crosses those few steps of space with his easy struggler’s stride and wraps his arms around the son who drove a blade through his heart, at just about the same distance.

Rey doesn’t breathe.

This makes for an earthshattering stillness, a different kind of silence, mercifully voiceless, and unbroken until Rey thinks she can hear all of their heartbeats.

Father draws back from son, one hand clenched on Ben’s shoulder and the other lifting gently to rest on the furrow that carves across Ben’s face.

“Quite the scratch there,” Han observes, like he’s only seeing it for the first time. “Gives you character. Who gave it to you?”

“She did,” Ben says hoarsely. He doesn’t look at Rey.

Inexplicably, Han grins broadly. “Keep ‘em both,” he says.

Ben turns scarlet. Rey clears her throat, hurriedly, and says, “I think we should be going.”

But in that moment, they are already gone.

 

_Falling._

_Oh, to remember…oh, to return. To look up into a vast well of empty darkness, and see there a light reflected, an answered call, a soft gaze amid the volley of enemy fire._

_(This is who we are.)_

A bird sings. No bird that Rey knows, though Rey only knew the scrap vultures of Jakku for most of her life. This lyrical trill is one sliver alone of one day of her life, but it is a day in which almost everything that mattered coalesced like molten gold and light.

 _Takodana_.

There is stony dust on her skin and clothes. She feels the hard lump of the lightsaber pieces in her belt. She stands, unsteadily, amid ruins she recognizes.

It feels too long ago to be true, to be real, but she did come here, on Leia’s orders. She was looking for answers, and she—she—

Less than a dozen paces from where she stands, Kylo Ren rises from the rubble.

Rey stands, speechless. But when he sees her, his face clears.

“Ben?” she ventures. Her throat is hoarse and sore, as if she has been screaming.

“You’re here,” he whispers.

“Do you—”

“Remember?”

 

_Remember how you kissed my hands, how we held each other after the fall, remember your father, remember—_

“Yes,” Ben says heavily, sweeping his hair away from his forehead with one gloved hand. “I remember it all. You, me. Another life.”

“Another future.” Rey does not mean it to sound bitter. She doesn’t mean anything, in this moment, because that is too much to string together in the quaking uncertainty of her mind and soul. She is want and hope, now, and very little else.

He takes a step closer. The sky is blindingly blue; the birds sing louder still and the city has fallen but the forest never will.

“We got what we wanted, didn’t we?” _Softly_. Those lips, softly.

Rey holds him only with a gaze. No words. No touch. Not yet.

“You, the ruler. Me, the scavenger. Is that what you would call hope? Is that what you _did_ hope?”

“I’ve hoped for long enough,” Rey answers. He is close enough that if he stretched out his hand—

—her hand could rise to meet it.

“I’ve never had much hope.” He half-turns, a study in profile, a fallen knight who has nowhere left to fall, and so may find himself suddenly on solid ground. “Isn’t that uglier? Born of the parents I was, raised in the Light as I was—”

“Hurt,” Rey says. “Hurt, as you were.”

His eyes meet hers again. “Jump,” he whispers. “Jump with me, Rey. I care nothing for a future that enslaves our past.”

Tears swarm Rey’s vision. “I told you. I can’t be who you want.”

“You are who I want.” He _does_ reach for her now, and warm leather closes around her fingers as his hands lace with hers. “Not the vision. Not the ruler. Just you.”

Rey wants to tell him that they have everything to lose. That she asked him to jump, and he did, and when she found him along some meridian of time she ran to him because it seemed the only thing to do. She wants to tell him that she wants _him_ , too, not the vision, not the scarless face—but all of that is too much to say in such a brief, immortal moment, and so Rey only says, “I love you, Ben Solo.”

It turns out that that is what she wanted to say all along.

( _It’s not like that._ )

( _But you want it to be._ )

Ben Solo crumbles, only it isn’t Ben Solo at all, but the last pieces of Kylo Ren. He stumbles a little, or perhaps Rey leans in, but whichever it is no longer matters. Her hands find the soft wealth of his hair, his gloves are torn off and his hot fingertips are tracing the lines of her throat.

“Please,” he whispers, torn, against her mouth, and Rey murmurs back, blaster-quick, “ _Please_ never works on me,” and then he crushes her lips with his.

(They fit together.)

Rey allows the invasion of grazing teeth and wildfire longing, gives as good as she gets, and does not— _does not_ —let go. She is so much smaller than he is, but she matches every inch of him.

Rey has been waiting every moment of her life to be met and matched, to be needed and loved in equal measure.

 

Rey, who mends the broken.

Rey, who walks with the Force, but not because she has to.

Rey, who has been found.

 

Kylo’s hand is against her waist, now, spanning an impossibly wide distance with thumb and forefinger, points of searing warmth. He nudges against the lightsaber, and Rey almost laughs into their kiss.

“Do you want it back?” she asks huskily. “It’s still broken, you know.”

“It’s yours,” he answers promptly.

“I’m not a Skywalker.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “That can be managed.”

The last unflushed inch of Rey’s skin floods with a blushing glow, as though they haven’t just been locked against each other. “I’m not of the bloodline.”

His brow furrows with gentle reproach, and his hand is trembling slightly as he tucks a strand of her hair back from her cheek. “You’re the savior of the bloodline,” Ben Solo tells her, and Rey leans against him, against his heartbeat, certain that she could remain there forever.

 

(Hux shoots from behind.)

 

“Rey?”

Everything tastes of salt. Taste is all that Rey can manage, at the moment: she is weightless and formless, otherwise. When she opens her eyes, the world is white. A dark shape shimmers into relief; Leia. Leia Organa, alive and well and…somehow, older?

“What…” Her voice is rusty, out of use. “What…where—Ben—”

“Be still,” Leia lays a hand on Rey’s. And yes, Rey still has hands. Not so formless after all. “You’re still weak.”

 

The story will be told to her, on Endor, by many different people. Rose will tell her that the blaster bolt seared all the flesh to the right side of her heart, that it still seems impossible that she survived. Finn will tell her that she has been in stasis for six moon cycles, and that there were too many times to count when all of them believed that the end was near.

Poe will tell her that Hux is dead, and all the captains of the First Order with him, since they led the frontal assault on the ruins of Takodana.

Leia will tell her that Ben Solo destroyed a ship that shouldn’t have been flown at lightspeed, by flying it at lightspeed; that the ragtag rebel forces parted before him as he carried Rey to his mother’s waiting arms. That he knew to find them on Endor, but waged no war; that he asked for no forgiveness, but has spent the past six months acting in retribution for the First Order’s crimes, in every corner of the galaxy.

Leia will tell her that Ben Solo loves her, but this, of course, Rey already knows.

 

“I want to see him.”

“You’re barely fit to see anyone,” Leia says. She has not asked a single question about Takodona; Rey’s muddled mind is sure that she has much to tell, but it all feels so long ago that she wouldn’t know where to begin.

“Does he know I’m alive?”

“He does.”

“Is he—is it safe for him to come here?”

“He won’t hurt us.” Leia’s eyes are grave, but peaceful. “And we don’t have the firepower to hurt him.” The smile has been a long-time coming; it illuminates her face. There is the beautiful princess of Alderaan, crowned at last by a mother’s love. “Some still want to; most don’t. We grow wise, and merciful, Rey, as we grow old.”

 

“I’ve kept this safe for you.” Finn presses a bundle into her hands, and Rey knows what it is at once.

“The saber.”

“He said he could mend it.” Finn doesn’t say who _he_ is, but his tone is forbidding enough that Rey can guess. “But I said, it stays with me until Rey tells us what to do.” He puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes. Their hearts—hers and Finn’s—will always keep each other close. “Rey, do you…”

“Yes.” She is still a little shaky on her feet. Still too thin, and too lightheaded. But Rey has not one modicum of doubt. “Yes, Finn, I do.”

 

If dreams are more than dreams, and other worlds exist and break in the same way as those that are known, then Rey of Nowhere loves Ben Organa Solo as much as he always loves her.

 

“I _need_ to see him,” Rey says, and because she is strong enough, she wanders the mists of Endor and lays open her mind.

(Rey, who waits.)

 

When an unmarked First Order ship makes planetfall on Endor, the Resistance watches with wary eyes. But Leia walks among them, a steady voice and reassuring gaze, and there is no protest, no whisper of fear.

Rey, leaning on Finn’s arm, strides along a cleared path towards the lowering hatch. She blinks through the rush of steam. She _waits_ —

 

She doesn’t have to wait any longer.

 

His kisses are tender, this time, because he has found her on the other side of nearly losing her. There is a hush around them, the hush of a people who have survived from one end of history to the next, and who are quiet when they see the first gleam of hope reborn.

“Ben,” Rey breathes, because Rey is not afraid of any silence, “Ben, you’re here.”

His smile is his father’s and his eyes are his mother’s and his scar is hers, and yet somehow in all of this he is more his own man than he has ever been.

“We are here,” he replies. He is still draped in black, but the cloth at his throat is gray and fine-woven, like something of Leia’s making. “But dear one, where are we going?”

Rey rests her arms around him still, but half-turns to face the crowd behind them. In a clear voice, she says, “We are going forward.”

And to Ben Solo, she whispers, “That is why you and I came back.”

 

 _…the sky on fire,_  
_the gold light falling backward through the glass_  
_of every room. I’ll give you my heart to make a place_  
_for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger._  
_Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars_  
_for you? That I would take you there?_

_We are all going forward. None of us are going back._

_\- Richard Siken_


End file.
